The rise of the late baby boomers

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: The rise of the late baby boomers
Barack Obama and many of the people he's bringing to Washington came of age after the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggles. Their shared experiences offer insights into how they may govern.
By Scott Kraft
December 18, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama may well be one of the 79 million members of the baby boom generation. But he's a late-wave boomer, a child of the 1970s -- as are half of the two dozen people he's selected thus far to help him lead the country.

Many of those Obama is bringing to Washington -- including his Education secretary, Homeland Security chief, Treasury secretary, United Nations ambassador and Energy czar -- came of age in the era of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. And their shared experiences offer insights into how they may govern: They tend to be less ideological than early boomers, more respectful of contrary opinions, more pragmatic and a lot less likely to get bogged down by the shibboleths of the 1960s, according to historians, marketers and pollsters.

Late boomers were doing wheelies on bikes and playing with dolls back when early boomers were fighting in Vietnam, avoiding the draft, singing along with the Mamas & the Papas, mourning a president, marching for civil rights and trekking to Woodstock. Obama's peers were defined by Watergate, stagflation, gas lines and 20% interest rates. Their cultural touchstones were groups like the Carpenters and Steely Dan (on cassette or eight-track tapes, of course), and shows like "All in the Family" and "Charlie's Angels" (you know who you are). In Hawaii, young Barry Obama was tuning into "Soul Train," which began its 35-year run in 1971.

The postwar baby boomers were those Americans born from 1946 to 1964. But Jonathan Pontell, a Los Angeles marketing and political consultant, says generational experience, not birthrates, is what defines a generation....

***

Generalizations about generations, of course, are fraught with exceptions for such things as income, race, family circumstances and geography. Still, people who sell consumer products, as well as people who sell politicians, make big bets on those broad-brush portraits. And if late boomers, 1 of every 4 adults in America, are moving in and starting to take over from early boomers, that's bound to have some implications for the country.

One result could be an end to the early boomers' obsession with the Vietnam War, according to Scott Rasmussen, a nonpartisan pollster and, at 52, a late boomer....Rasmussen contends that the decisive vote for Obama, who was too young to go to Vietnam, over John McCain, a bona fide hero from that war, was an indication that Vietnam was beginning to lose its power to influence American elections....However, late boomers are neither reliably Democratic nor Republican; they were about evenly split between Obama and McCain. And, some argue, both sides seem to share Obama's pragmatic political outlook.

"Older boomers had this naive assumption that you could get rid of the bad and the good would be wonderful," said Ann Clurman, executive vice president of the Futures Company and coauthor of "Generation Ageless," a treatise on baby boomers. "Younger boomers tend to say there is bad and good in everything, and nothing is perfect."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-na-generations18-2008dec18,0,2414596,full.story

[Oregone]

1. Oh, now there is late Baby Boomers?

OR are they just trying to hijack, as a generation, the glory of the president being sent to Washington. They want their name on the cake too...

Late boomers? WTF? Will this generation, and the lame articles constantly written about them, go the fuck away already?

[Skittles]

3. I'm part of Generation Jones

we've always been called boomers but we were nothing like the Big Chill crowd - it sucked

[htuttle]

16. Punk rockers, New Wavers, and the Alex Keaton crowd

Quite a strange lot are we...

(Class of 1981)

[pnwmom]

5. Sorry, but this is nothing new. Obama has ALWAYS been a baby boomer,

since the boom occurred in the generation after the war, ending in 1964.

If anyone tried to "hijack, as a generation, the glory of the President" it is the generation that followed the Baby Boomers. Barack Obama, like my brother, was born in 1961. My other siblings and I were born in the late 50's, which makes us all boomers -- just like Obama.

Maybe your generation will produce the next President, but this one belongs to the Boomers.

}(

[pipi_k]

14. No kidding!

According to a few sites I've read (Wikipedia being one of them), the "Baby Boom" generation lasted from 1946 to 1964.

Anyone born after that, OK, I'd give the benefit of the doubt up to maybe 1966.

After that, no.

And certainly NOT into the 1970s.


Post Baby Boomers, maybe, but NOT "Late Baby Boomers"!!!



Let 'em get their own damned generation name!!!!! x(

[Indiana_Dem]

2. That would be MY generation! I'm a late boomer. 1964.

I always was/am called a good mediator.

[newfie11]

4. OK What's a yuppie?

I have trouble keeping all these titles correct. Could be my advanced age as I am a baby boomer.

[pnwmom]

6. That had two definitions when it was popular.

Young urban professional
young upscale professional


Take your pick.

[newfie11]

7. OK thanks.

So the late baby boomer's are to old to be yuppies.

[enuegii]

8. No, the yuppies were late boomers, but...

all late boomers are not necessarily yuppies.

[Rabrrrrrr]

9. I, for one, will be glad when the government is run by people born after 1960.

The previous generation has done a pretty shit job.

[shrike]

10. They forgot to mention an important benchmark for this generation: AIDS

I'm Obama's age, and when we lived our young adulthood at a time when the whole AIDS crisis snowballed. We watched the whole thing unfold.

When I was at college, many young men, and women, were just coming out; I'm hetero, but knew many young gays. I remember all the young men, so full of hope -- I wonder how many of them are still alive.

[DeepModem Mom]

12. Good point, shrike -- very significant. nt

[Fire1]

11. I think it's more accurate to refer to them as 'post' baby boomers

[musiclawyer]

13. I'm of these people

We are most accutely aware of how insipid mass media is, and we have an innate undestanding that government must be run by people who want to govern not profit. I am certain we will run government better than our elders, but I think those now in their 20's will really do the best job when their time comes. They will make sure that drug wars end, and that all trade pacts are fair, and that elections are clean etc

[Sentath]

15. Huh, so I'm not an X

1969, and neither is my little brother, 1980

[southernyankeebelle]

17. Boomer

Am a boomer but I wasn't way out there. I was kinda a square. I didn't do drugs or drink or had sex until I got married. I was 29 yrs old when I got married and have been married to the utsame man for 30 yrs. There were alot of good things that happened in the 60s and many bad. The worse was the VN conflict. It was never a declared war. A lot of good young men died for nothing. I supported the troops but never supported the war. I had friends that died there. The sad thing is they will never know what it was like to get married and raise and family and grow old. I think if you look back on it even now people will tell you we should never had gone there. My dad was there before the build up but he retired. He said he was to old and already fought WWII and Korea and he had enough. My father-in-law was a trainer over there and he said he new from the beginning we wouldn't win because the people didn't have the fight in themselves. He was there 1 yr and his wife said if he didn't retire she would divorce him. He retired just in time because they had him set to go again. He also was in WWII and Korea. Both Dad and father-in-law were wounded in battle.

[Hestia]

18. Too cool - I've been wondering when our time would come. Think about it -

the people in their 70s, 80s and 90s normally would have passed away, but with modern medicine, it has really delayed death statistics. Our time should have come much earlier, but hey, I guess we'll take it as it is. We aren't the one's with all the creative education. Our Pluto is in Virgo - Service Oriented, Health Conscious, after all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed if it's broke - Fix It! But it also seems, from what I just read, that we are not the one's who went to college. We went to work out of high school instead of going on to higher education. But we are more flexible, through trial and error.