Generational tension, and maybe generational war, is an inevitable part of the Age of Obama.
—Newsweek (January 17, 2009)
The modern history of old age politics is far more complex, and the future will not be as scary as some predict.
—James Schulz and Robert Binstock (2006)
In February 2007, a key Republican political tactician, whom I shall call “the Strategist,” told me he had given little or no thought to aging baby boomers as a political force. Age-based voting was not an especially important factor on Republicans’ political radar screen—nor were Democratic strategists considering aging boomers’ political potential.
“We look at the data,” the Strategist told me. “By numbers, boomers are the ‘pig in the python.’ But that’s about it. They’ve not been through a cohesive, transformational threat. On the political side, they’re a difficult group to categorize.” He paused and then added, “The one unifying thing about boomers is their sense of entitlement,” especially with regard to Social Security. The Republican voter strategy, he informed me, was values driven. “We look at religion, education, family. Married or not married.”
Winter daylight streaming through high windows in the Strategist’s huge, high-ceilinged executive office building suite dimmed dramatically. Outside, a heavy shower of sleet and snow started to shut down Washington, D.C., and much of the East Coast. Federal employees and many other political appointees left work early. The Strategist and his aides remained at their posts. As his other afternoon appointments canceled, my original forty-five-minute interview drifted into a two-hour conversation.
We discussed the administration’s failed Social Security reform initiative. The Strategist admitted some polling evidence of different generational responses to the initiative—reflecting a pattern typically found among age groups. Those aged sixty and above wanted no change. Those aged forty-five to fifty-two were nervous. Younger voters “mouthed the arguments [in favor of personalized Social Security accounts] but didn’t care.”
The Strategist echoed a growing Washington lament on entitlement reform in an era of polarization. “Politics trumps long-term planning.” Rather prophetically, he added that “only a major crisis would prompt serious change.”
When I asked him about AARP, the Strategist’s eyes narrowed. He became animated. “They are evil!” he snorted. He went on to say that the Bush White House felt double-crossed by the giant lobbying organization. AARP had worked cooperatively with the White House in enacting the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act that added prescription drug coverage to Medicare. But then, after some positive overtures on similar cooperation on Social Security reform, AARP instead worked hard to torpedo Bush’s effort to institute private Social Security accounts.
The Strategist grumbled that behind closed doors AARP officials admitted serious, long-term fiscal problems with Social Security. Publicly, however, they claimed that only minor tinkering with the program was needed. The Strategist sneered at AARP’s CEO Bill Novelli for “hiding behind their president [Marie Smith], a leftist, radical woman.” Like several other Republicans to whom I spoke, he complained that the left-wing, pro–big government AARP “leverages their marketing for political purposes.”
When I mentioned the potential convergence of interests between aging boomers and AARP, the Strategist considered this as if for the first time. He became intrigued and we talked about a boomer-AARP alliance for several minutes. “AARP,” he mused, “could create generational politics.”1 Indeed, they already had.
Boomers responded strongly in support of AARP’s campaign against George W. Bush’s efforts to introduce “personalized” accounts into the Social Security system.2 The Democratic Party consultants Greenberg Quinlin Rosner, in a 2005 voter attitude survey, also found the most negative responses to Bush’s proposals by voters in their fifties—older baby boomers.3
Well before the 2008 stock market crash and Great Recession there were rumblings of anxiety and discontent among baby boomers. A boomer profile by McKinsey and Company found that many “are anxious, frustrated, more concerned about their future than were members of the previous generation.”4 Career consultant Andrew Johnson also sensed an underlying anxiety about Social Security among his upscale clients in real estate and banking. Boomers, Johnson stated, saw Social Security as the last remaining certainty in an increasingly insecure workplace and world. “Boomers seem to think that it’s nice to know that there’s something you can depend on.”5
Boomers’ parents and grandparents felt the same way—and became feared as a formidable “senior vote,” a potentially unified force allegedly ready to terminate the career of any politician who touched the “third rail” of Social Security or Medicare cutbacks. But was this fear justified?
Some social scientists argue that age is not a significant factor in political behavior and that senior power is something of a myth. And baby boomers’ senior power potential has yet to show itself in that generation’s earlier voting patterns.
Before discussing the relationship between age and politics, it is necessary to note the extensive overlap of age, race, and the baby boom—implicit throughout this book. In discussing the white eligible-voter population, the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey emphasized the correlation of “white” with “age”—largely due to the dominance of the boomers: “An attribute of the white eligible-voter population that distinguishes it from the other eligible-voter populations is its age. More dominated by baby boomers than the other groups, over half are over age forty-five and nearly a fifth are over age sixty-five. Compared with the total eligible-voter population, whites are more educated, have higher incomes and are more likely to be married and are almost universally native-born. But it is their age more than any other attribute that drives their demographic profile.”6
As seen in chapter 1, about 24 percent of Older Boomers are black, Hispanic, and Asian, as are 27 percent of Younger Boomers. However, minority boomers are rarely subcategorized in age-based data; indeed, until recently, the boomer age demographic (roughly ages forty-five to sixty-four) was imprecisely referenced, if at all. Therefore, throughout this book, unless otherwise noted, discussions of “boomer politics” and “age politics” will refer, somewhat by default, largely to the political behavior and attitudes of non-Hispanic whites.
As a whole, boomers have not yet voted as a distinctive generational “bloc,” though Duane F. Alwin detected broad, distinctive generational response patterns to survey items included in the University of Michigan National Election Studies during the 1980s and 1990s. Those findings confirmed boomers’ increasingly conservative, antigovernment attitudes (discussed in the previous chapter).7 John B. Williamson concurred and, consequently, saw little possibility of any aging boomer activism: “It is unlikely that there will be a sharp increase in political activism among the baby boomers as they move into old age,” in part because the increasing heterogeneity and inequality among boomers will make organizational efforts more difficult. Nonetheless, Williamson held out the possibility of aging boomer activism in three potent policy arenas: Social Security, Medicare, and school taxation.8
Nor have boomers had a distinctive presence in presidential election voting. The boomer age group has generally mirrored the wider electorate—never decisively favoring any candidate. A majority of boomers voted for Ronald Reagan but then slightly tilted leftwards toward Bill Clinton. They gave George W. Bush small majorities in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. In 2008, boomers as a whole were evenly split between presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain by 50 percent to 49 percent—though white boomers gave McCain a 56 percent-42 percent margin.
Aging boomers have been increasingly attentive to Social Security and Medicare. The 2004 AARP “Boomers at Midlife” survey found that 71 percent of respondents reported at least a “somewhat favorable” view of Social Security (up 15 percent from a similar 2002 survey); 54 percent were very or somewhat confident that Social Security would be available when they retired (up 19 percent); and 47 percent were at least somewhat confident that they would receive Medicare (up 8 percent).9 Nearly 90 percent of boomer respondents in a 2005 Merrill Lynch survey of boomers agreed that their generation was fully entitled to Medicare and Social Security; 80 percent felt the same about prescription drug coverage.10 And, as already mentioned, many boomers opposed George W. Bush’s 2005 proposed changes to Social Security.
By 2009, an important change was occurring. Higher than expected numbers of baby boomers turning age sixty-two were filing for early Social Security benefits. This marked an ongoing generational transition from anticipating entitlements to “owning” them—and, perhaps, mobilizing politically to protect them.
But has any previous cohort of those over age sixty-five ever truly constituted a unified or voting bloc or political force? Or is senior power something of a myth?
The assumption of older voters’ actual or potential political power is premised upon their higher political participation rates—often attributed to increased leisure time in retirement, long-term residence, and increased attention to news media. That older voters’ dependence upon and interest in preserving Social Security and Medicare policies might explain their higher voting rates as a “program constituency” was a thesis advanced by Andrea Louise Campbell in How Policies Make Citizens.11 She argued that the advent and the expansion of first Social Security and then Medicare served to mobilize older citizens into a bloc of “Uber-citizens . . . an otherwise disparate group of people were given a new political identity as program recipients that provided a basis for their mobilization by political parties, interest groups and policy entrepreneurs.”12 Social Security benefits provided resources (income and free time) as well as the motivation to politically participate. Government policy became connected to seniors’ financial well-being.
Though Campbell discerned seniors’ rising awareness and participation, she did not demonstrate that they voted as a cohesive bloc—or that their voting patterns were significantly different from other groups. However, Campbell got closer to the source of “senior power” imagery by factoring into her model the rise of senior citizens’ interest groups as well as growth of a government-based “aging policy bureaucracy.” These organizations and the major political parties, rather than a unified senior voting bloc, strongly shaped past congressional perception and action on aging policies.
Robert Binstock has been the foremost critic of what he views as a mythical “senior power model” that presumes the primacy of age-based self interest in voting behavior that, in turn, produces a unified senior voting bloc. Binstock argues that empirical analyses of voting behavior find that voters’ choices are more often determined by factors other than age—such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and health status. Divisions among senior voters often mirror those among other age groups. Therefore, Binstock concludes, “The senior power model has little validity with respect to the political attitudes and voting behavior of older Americans, and only limited validity with respect to the power of U.S. old-age organizations.”13 In addition, he argues, the model exaggerates the influence and effectiveness of senior citizen interest groups such as AARP.
In their 2006 book Aging Nation, Binstock and coauthor James Schulz still maintained that there had been little evidence of age-based voting blocs. They also maintained that there was no systematic evidence that older voters had ever responded as a distinctive voting group to old-age policy issues (Medicare and Social Security).14 However, they admitted that senior power had remained a sleeping giant because of politicians’ fear of awakening it—especially through active discussions of Social Security and Medicare reforms: “Candidates are on the ballot, but issues affecting Social Security, Medicare and other national old-age policies are not.”15
Obviously, things have changed.
In 2009, threats to Medicare became a hot-button political issue when a five-hundred-billion-dollar reduction in its rate of growth was incorporated in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that narrowly passed the Congress in 2010. Some Republicans began to champion Medicare by invoking a fear of “death panels” and evoking imagery of rationed health care for the elderly. As will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6, voters over age fifty were (and remain) the most vocally opposed to Democrats’ health care reform proposals and were active in the spontaneous town hall protests in August 2009. These outbursts of collective protest behavior spurred the rise of the loosely organized “Tea Party movement,” in which older baby boomer whites have been heavily involved.
Before briefly discussing the Tea Party movement at the end of the chapter, it is necessary to examine a broader, key question in this chapter and in this book: whether there is yet a sufficient fusion of ideological consensus and collective economic convergence to galvanize a “critical mass” of Older Boomers into becoming a visible voting bloc or a more organized and active political movement. (The important potential leadership role of AARP in these policy debates will be discussed in chapters 5 and 6.)
Two key social psychological processes underpin mobilization and movement building. First, preexisting or socially constructed consensus on basic values and norms facilitates communication and interaction. Second, mobilization and organization are enhanced when there is convergence of similar interests and background characteristics—such as shared economic interests or shared sociological characteristics (gender, ethnicity, age, religion, region, etc.).16
In this chapter I shall examine evidence for and against cultural and ideological consensus among boomers. The prospects for economic convergence through shared risk in retirement and health care planning (or lack thereof) were touched upon in the previous chapter. The case for even greater convergence of economic interest and vulnerability in the wake of the 2008 stock market crash and the long Great Recession will be discussed in chapter 4. (Suffice it to say here that these events intensified aging boomers’ collective economic anxieties.)
In terms of cultural or ideological consensus, however, boomers’ fierce “do-it-yourself” individualism and an ideological divide rooted in class, occupation, education, and culture, may be potent factors blocking emergence of an age-based voting bloc or a more active, organized political movement based upon shared economic interests or anxieties.
In chapter 1 it was made clear that boomers, especially Older Boomers, accept their generational label and a loose age-based identity. They have much in common culturally, especially nostalgia for the music and popular culture of their youth. They are relatively ethnically homogeneous. They share a broad cultural base rooted in a childhood and adolescent history defined by prosperity, the cold war, relative ethnic homogeneity (due to low immigration levels), and a culture largely programmed by three national television networks and the rise of a formidable music radio and record industry. Older Boomers, especially, share passage through the political crucibles of the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. They have participated in massive institutional change at work and at home.
The impact of the “culture wars” stemming from the Vietnam War and other 1960s changes has been much debated in the media and social sciences. Some analysts, notably Alan Wolfe in One Nation after All, have argued that the culture wars have been overemphasized in the mass media. Wolfe argued that there is a broad moral and value consensus across most groups on a wide range of issues in American society.17
The 2008 elections strongly suggest that any broad, national moral and value consensus has absorbed the reformist goals and spirit of the 1960s movements. Peter Beinart vividly illustrated this accommodation by comparing the violent street protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention to the 2008 peaceful celebration of President Barack Obama’s election—and ideological change—in that same Chicago Grant Park setting: “Ideologically, the crowds who assembled to hear Obama on election night were linear descendants of those egg throwers four decades before. They too believe in racial equality, gay rights, feminism, civil liberties and people’s right to follow their own star. . . . Feminism is so mainstream that even Sarah Palin embraces the term; Chicago mayor Richard Daley, son of the man who told police to bash heads, marches in gay-rights parades. . . . Younger Americans—who voted overwhelmingly for Obama—largely embrace the legacy of the ’60s, and yet they constitute one of the most obedient, least rebellious generations in memory.”18
Whatever the impact of the 1960s and its culture wars, once youthful boomers are today crossing a number of “senior citizen” markers that signal increasing risk of mortality: early warning signals of chronic disease or its actual onset; rising problems with employer-based health insurance costs; the temptation of “senior citizen” discounts; and increasing awareness of personal mortality and awakening desires to leave enduring legacies. These passages were increasing age consciousness even before the economic shocks of 2008 and beyond.
Yet thus far aging boomers have responded as individuals. Their youthful calls for egalitarian, collective change seem a distant echo. Today, some issues engage aging boomers; others do not.
What is remarkable is that multiple shocks of the stock market crash, the real estate collapse, mass layoffs, and other aspects of what has come to be known as the Great Recession have not stimulated any sort of mass, left-wing protests advocating major changes in the system that led to these crises. The Obama White House and Democratic Congress enacted major progressive reforms of the health care and financial systems. But there are no broadly based 1960s-style egalitarian movements to redistribute wealth and power or to reverse the Great Risk Shift in retirement and health care costs to individuals.
Nor has age discrimination against graying boomers produced a “new civil rights movement”—as some had hoped. The deep and long recession unquestionably has made boomers far more aware of their vulnerability to age discrimination: in 2008, age discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission soared—up 29 percent over the previous year.19 Yet the mass filing of individual age discrimination complaints hardly constitutes collective outrage or protest.
Indeed, on June 18, 2009, a potentially galvanizing Supreme Court decision made it more difficult for plaintiffs to prove age discrimination. In Gross v. FBL Financial Services, the court reversed an earlier appellate court age discrimination standard that if a worker could demonstrate that age was one of many factors, then the employer was required to provide a reason unrelated to age. Justice Clarence Thomas’s 5–4 majority opinion now requires that the plaintiff must definitively prove that age was the primary factor in workplace discrimination.
With the exception of an initial, long front-page report on the Gross decision by the Los Angeles Times’s David Savage, there was little substantial acknowledgement elsewhere.20 Nor was there an immediate call to arms on the AARP Web page—which simply provided a link to Savage’s article. Instead, it was nearly a month before the New York Times lead editorial coupled notice and criticism of the ruling with a call for congressional repeal.21 More than a year later, despite quiet efforts in Congress to draft legislation mitigating the Gross decision (heavily supported by AARP), the case still generates little interest.
Aging boomers’ continuing ideological emphases upon individual actions and responsibility short-circuit the shared group communication and political consciousness-raising that promote a sense that “something needs to be done,” necessary ingredients for collective action and systematic reform. Even during the pessimism and hardships of the Great Recession, a 2010 Allstate-National Journal heartland monitor poll found that Americans were responding with a “back to basics” emphasis on individual responsibility, financial management, and frugality; they were less confident in American institutions and leadership.22
Thus age discrimination and the Great Recession’s massive job losses have been met with personal alienation, blame, and shame. “For weeks after he was laid off, Clinton Cole would rise at the usual time, shower, shave, and don one of his Jos. A Bank suits and head out the door of his Vienna home—to a job that no longer existed. He was careful to stay away until 5 p.m., whiling away the hours at the library or on a park bench. . . . Cole was too ashamed to tell anyone except his wife and family what had happened. . . . He felt as if he had done something wrong, even though he knew he hadn’t.”23 In another Washington Post report on the recession’s impact upon wealthy New York suburbs, three dozen mostly middle-aged residents interviewed for the story refused to permit publication of their names or identifying details.24 (A subsequent survey of the long-term unemployed by the Rutgers University Center for Workforce Development confirmed escalating levels of individual stress, depression, self-blame, and social withdrawal.)25
The complete lack of collective response to layoffs, high unemployment levels, and age discrimination stands in sharp contrast to the uproar among Americans over age fifty generated by health care reform. One example: on the AARP Web page, a defense of Democratic health care reform proposals by AARP’s president was met with a storm of nearly one thousand mostly angry responses; an article on that same Web site concerning an age discrimination lawsuit against AT&T drew only three reader comments.26 (Indeed, as will be seen in chapter 6, AARP officials were dismayed to discover that opposition was strongest among their own constituency.)
This selective, issue-oriented, highly individualized boomer politics was predicted by a 2004 AARP study entitled A Changing Political Landscape. Though completed well before the current economic traumas, the authors concluded that boomers’ common cultural heritage would not be sufficient to generate a voting bloc or a rerun of 1960s mass-movement protests. Instead, aging boomer politics would be issue oriented, reflecting a more limited political style of “tailored engagement,” operating outside the traditional two-party system via Web-based communities and “checkbook activism.”27 Boomers’ “strong sense of entitlement and self-directed motivations will help to create a more decentralized, broader, community-based path for activism.”28
Any tendencies toward unified Boomer consensus in values and politics is also being fragmented by broader sociological variables: (1) socioeconomic status, (2) ethnicity, (3) educational levels, (4) age subgroups—Older and Younger Boomers have somewhat different life experiences, (5) family status—married versus unmarried, children versus no children; (6) regional differences, (7) religious differences, and (7) lingering cultural/political divisions from the 1960s.
But the 2008 elections strongly suggest that cultural and political differences today are less about well-worn debates over issues from the 1960s than about a widening class-based cultural divide. Past arguments about abortion and affirmative action linger, but, increasingly, debates are grounded in a clash of class-based worldviews. The key debate here is the increasing influence of global supercapitalism versus the waning influence and identity of local communities and the nation-state.
The relationship between income, assets, and retirement outlook was evident in the AARP and Merrill Lynch studies discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, a broader and deeper class, political, and cultural divide is increasingly structuring American politics in general and boomers’ politics in particular. Along with their commitment to individualism, this class/political/cultural divide is the factor most likely to thwart the consensus and convergence necessary to produce a boomer voting bloc or political movement.
Just as Older Boomers moved into their most productive years during the 1980s and 1990s, technology, globalization, and immigration transformed the American middle class into two polarized subclasses.29 Generally speaking, there has been a growing, politically liberal, highly educated, globally oriented, prosperous upper middle class rooted in the professional and managerial occupations, often residents of major urban areas on the East or West Coast—or in university enclaves.30 Their multicultural and international worldview and policy predilections for top-down “management” of societal problems through social engineering are typically opposed by those who are to be managed: a declining lower middle and working class that is primarily white, without college degrees, culturally conservative, nationalistic, locally oriented, and antielitist and that tends to be made up of (traditional) “values voters.” Their presence is especially strong in the nation’s interior: the midwestern heartland, the South and Southwest, and the mountain states. (Most of the “battleground states” in the 2008 elections were in these regions.)
All Americans have been affected by this major change in social stratification, but boomers were at the epicenter of this sociological earthquake. “Over the past 20 years,” observed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, “college-educated white people with above average income have become happier, more optimistic and more trusting, even as their fellow citizens in the lower quarter of the social economic pyramid have grown less happy, less optimistic and less trusting.”31
Several scholars have charted the growth and characteristics of a new globally oriented upper middle class. Christopher Lasch, in his 1995 classic The Revolt of the Elites, observed that members of “the upper middle class, the heart of the new professional and managerial elites,” have a distinctive outlook and lifestyle that sets them apart from the rest of the nation. Their fortunes and loyalties are tied to international enterprises, and they have “more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications.”32
Likewise, Robert Kaplan in An Empire Wilderness found that “as the income gap widens, the American middle class continues to split into an increasingly rarified upper middle class and an increasingly downtrodden lower middle class as the middle slowly fades into one or the other.”33 The new upper middle class has increasingly segregated itself into semi-self-contained suburban “pods” that “are creating an international civilization influenced by the impersonal, bottom-line values of the corporations for which these people work.”34 Via computers and satellites, the professional classes are far more involved with national and international peers; they may have little or no familiarity with—and little interest in—local groups or local government. National interests and loyalties are submerged in global concerns. “Rather than citizens, the inhabitants of these prosperous pods are, in truth, resident expatriates, even if they were born in America, with their foreign cuisines, eclectic tastes, exposure to foreign languages, and friends throughout the world.”35
These professional and managerial classes quite naturally have a deep and abiding faith in their ability to rationally manage human affairs. Indeed, Older Boomers came of age during the ascent of “the best and the brightest” ethos—a faith in meritocracy and managerial hubris enshrined in 1960s Kennedy administration.36 Forty years later, the writer Joan Didion observed that her upper-middle-class friends “shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills.” All problems could be solved by the right expert with the proper information.37
Boomers Bill Clinton and Bill Gates are exemplars of this managerial, globally oriented class. Their vast philanthropic efforts are international. The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman epitomizes such views in his columns and in his books, notably The World Is Flat. America’s cultural, political, and commercial elites champion—or, at least, quietly accept—multiculturalism, high immigration levels, and affirmative action.38
In its most aggressive forms, this upper-middle-class worldview hardens into a more dogmatic “political correctness,” an aggressive form of censorship and labeling as “racist” or “reactionary” those with dissident views. Targets often have been middle-aged and older white middle- and working-class voters. (See chapter 4.) For more than twenty years, this elites-masses clash has appeared most vividly in polling data and in heated rhetoric over multicultural and social engineering issues such as affirmative action and immigration reform.39
The American working and middle classes (including many immigrant groups) tend to maintain an older worldview centered on beliefs in American exceptionalism; economic and cultural nationalism; individual initiative and responsibility rooted in local churches, schools, and communities; and “family values.” They believe in “free enterprise” and the hope of upward mobility. By and large, the white middle-aged and older middle classes are part of a nationalist “Old America” that mistrusts, and in some cases has been economically wounded by, the elites’ prescriptions for an internationalist “New America.” They reject the elites’ multiculturalism and believe that immigrants should assimilate to “American” values.
The Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has been attuned to the values and fears of many middle- and working-class Americans. “So many Americans right now fear that they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders and that we don’t teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.”40
This widening class/political/cultural divide has been evident in the voting and political behavior of boomers and other Americans. They have been part of a central political paradox noted by Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville:41 though college-educated, upper-income voters remain Republican in presidential elections, Democratic candidates have been gaining a greater percentage of them; meanwhile, the white working classes, once the backbone of the Democratic Party, have trended toward Republican, antitax, traditionalist, “strong defense” candidates—at the apparent expense of their own economic interests.42 Again, this divide appears to have begun within—and remained deepest in—the baby boom generation.
Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira studied the voting divide between the rising upper middle class and the declining white working class largely through the variable of college/noncollege. Beginning in 1984, disaffected non-college-educated whites became “Reagan Democrats,” in presidential campaigns. By 2004 “among non-college-educated whites with $30,000-$50,000 in household income Bush beat Kerry by 24 points (62–38). . . . And among non-college-educated whites with $50-$75,000 in household income, Bush beat Kerry by a shocking 41 points (70–29).” The defection of the white working class was especially steep in the South.43
In 2004, John Kerry won college-educated white voters at the $50,000 to $75,000 household income level by 5 percent. Above the $100,000 income threshold, Bush won college graduates by 60 to 39 percent; but he won those with advanced degrees by only 51 to 48 percent.44 (Slightly different findings resulted when Brady et al. used occupational groupings rather than education to demarcate the white working class. From 1972 to 1992, the white working-class vote mirrored the general electorate. After 1996, white working-class men did indeed shift to Republicans; white working-class women did not.)45
Along with race and age, this trend strongly structured baby boomer voting in the 2008 presidential election and afterwards in attitudes toward President Obama and in the 2010 national congressional races.46 The youngest and oldest voters also voted distinctively. Younger voters voted 2–1 for Democrat Barack Obama. Voters over sixty-five were the only age group who favored McCain.
Upscale, well-educated whites—many of them boomers—were essential builders of the Obama political coalition. Indeed, before the primary voting began, many boomers in the major news media and political establishments helped pave the path for the Obama bandwagon. The white working and middle classes tended to prefer Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
“Goodbye to All That” was Andrew Sullivan’s parting shot at polarized boomer politics in his Atlantic cover story on December 7, 2007. The influential writer and blogger proclaimed that “Obama is the only candidate who can take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation.” Obama’s very face, waxed Sullivan, would lead to the most effective “re-branding” of America to the rest of the world since Reagan. As president, Obama’s multiethnic, multinational heritage would ipso facto give the lie to international terrorism’s portrait of a racist America “in a way that no words can.” In symbol and style, an Obama presidency had the potential to transcend religious, racial, and generational divides. “We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about,” gushed Sullivan. “His name is Obama.”47
The baby boomer daughter and granddaughter of two former iconic presidents boarded the Obama bandwagon. “We need a change in the leadership of this country—just as we did in 1960,” wrote Caroline Kennedy in a New York Times op-ed. “All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives . . . and the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to his children. . . . As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.”48 (Her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, simultaneously endorsed Obama.) One week later Susan Eisenhower published her endorsement in a Washington Post op-ed.49
The Generation X political journalist Matt Bai applauded this welcome generational leadership change in the New York Times Magazine. “For those of us Obama’s age and younger, the formative events of the 1960s, the enmities and shared experiences that defined the next 40 years of American politics are as much a part of history as the Treaty of Versailles; we weren’t shaped by this constant sense of political Armageddon. . . . But from here out . . . the balance will shift until ultimately the ‘Top Gun’ generation has pushed aside the boomer establishment.”50
Obama’s main antagonist, baby boomer Hillary Clinton, was dismayed to find herself portrayed as a symbol of the past. “The Boomers Had Their Day, Make Way for the Millennials,” trumpeted a Washington Post op-ed by Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais in February 2008. Obama was identifying Clinton with the older, idealistic “ ‘Moses generation’ ” that led the children of Israel out of slavery, while aligning himself with the more practical “ ‘Joshua Generation’ ” that actually built the Kingdom of Israel. This was an “election battle that’s being fought along the dividing line between these two generational archetypes.”51
“Clinton is what our country has been,” a Harvard law student told New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. “She’s not where we’re going, which is more diverse, more global, with fewer expectations about what it means to be black or white.”52
But many aging boomers were not pleased to have their generation’s politics and politicians consigned to the past. Former President Bill Clinton bristled at such suggestions by PBS interviewer Charlie Rose.
CHARLIE ROSE: And when people say we need to go beyond looking back at the ’60s or even the ’90s, then you say, “I think a lot of good things happened in the ’60s, and I think a lot of good things happened in the ’70s, in the 80s and the ’90s.”
BILL CLINTON: If that’s relevant. Look at this decade. Look at this record. She [Hillary Clinton] has been a completely modern senator. She has sponsored—she just passed a bill, as a candidate for president, with Lindsay Graham who led my—who was one of the impeachment managers, to extend the family and medical leave law to the families of veterans who were suffering physical and emotional trauma in Iraq or Afghanistan. I mean that’s . . . that’s got nothing to do with the ’90s. That’s sort of a superficial, you know, bigotry. That’s like ageism or something. It’s like if you fought and did good things, we got to give you a gold watch and tell you goodbye.53
The political and cultural divide between the pro-Obama, educated, liberal upper-middle class and the less educated, traditional, working-class pro-Clinton supporters became especially evident in the Democratic primary contests. Especially in the Midwest and South, Hillary Clinton’s campaign attracted more downscale, less educated, working-class whites and small-town residents.
“Among white voters, socioeconomic status permeates the Obama v. Clinton contest,” observed Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics.com. “It seems that one’s inclination to vote for a candidate does not depend simply upon age and gender, but age and gender in the context of socioeconomic status. These factors interact with one another. . . . White youth are more likely to vote for Obama than white women or men of all ages, but the particular likelihood that a white youth will vote for Obama also depends upon his or her socioeconomic status. Ditto white females.” Income and college variables “account for 40 percent of the variation in Obama’s share of the white male vote.”54 The heavily boomer white working-class vote was crucially important in “Republican swing states,” that Clinton won in 1996 but that John Kerry lost in 2004. In those states, white boomer voters favored Clinton over Obama by 61 percent to 34 percent.55
By the November general election, white boomers (aged forty-five to sixty-four in the CNN exit poll classification) voted for McCain over Obama 56 percent to 42 percent, but this margin differed little from other white age groups except for those aged eighteen to twenty-nine, who voted for Obama over McCain, 54 percent to 44 percent. (About 90 percent of blacks in all age groups voted for Obama, while Obama received almost two-thirds of the Latino vote—with the curious exception of Latino boomers, who gave Obama a 58 percent majority.)56 Noncollege “working-class” whites gave McCain the exact same margin as they had given George W. Bush: 58 to 40 percent. College-educated whites voted for McCain, 51 percent to 47 percent. (Obama improved over Kerry’s 2004 showing by 3 percent.)57
Obama was most strongly favored by both the very poor and the very rich. Voters with incomes below $15,000 gave him a 73 percent to 25 percent margin; voters with incomes from $100,000 to $150,000 slightly favored McCain by 51 percent to 48 percent; voters with incomes above $200,000 gave Obama a relatively strong 52 percent to 46 percent advantage—for Republicans, that represented a 17-point drop in support from 2004. (In a postelection poll by National Journal/Heartland Institute, Obama registered unusually high approval levels among several traditionally Republican-leaning high-status occupational groups: 48 percent of the self-employed and 55 percent from college-educated “knowledge workers” such as consultants, engineers, and lawyers.)58
These race, class, education, and marital status splits in boomer voting patterns will likely remain. Indeed, the drift of the white working class away from Democrats worried Democratic strategists planning for the 2010 and 2012 elections.59 Especially via the Tea Party movement (discussed below), middle- and working-class white boomers—including large numbers of small-business and self-employed Americans—appear to have formed the core of an antigovernment, anti-Obama movement, largely among Republicans and Independents. Conversely, the pro-Obama voting coalition has built upon large segments of upper-middle-class professionals, as well as among unmarried women, Latinos, and African Americans (the latter groups now constitute 43 percent of the electorate) and, of course, voters under age thirty.60
But the most remarkable age power story was youth power. Under-thirty voters were very visibly active in Obama’s campaign and gave him a decisive 2–1 majority. If only voters under thirty had voted, Obama would have won 481 Electoral College votes to McCain’s 57. But the stability and staying power of this “Generation Obama” remains in doubt.
Early in the 2008 primaries, the New York Times reporter Katherine Q. Seelye marveled that “age has been one of the most consistent indicators of how someone might vote—more than sex, more than income, more than education. Only race is a stronger predictor of voting than age, and then only if a voter is black, not if he or she is white.”61 This was true throughout the election. The postelection analysis of NBC’s Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser offered the understatement that “this year the gap between young and old increased a lot.”62
“Younger voters,” the political scientist Patrick Fisher has observed, “tend to be more liberal and more supportive of Democratic candidates than other age groups.” Younger voters are generally more favorable toward activist government and more supportive of spending for both public schools and child care. They are as likely as senior voters to favor increased spending for Social Security, but they are also more favorable to Social Security reform. Fisher concluded that strong age group differences are rooted in different generational value systems. “Younger voters put less of an emphasis on “traditional values.” However, Fisher warns that “the partisan polarization in the United States is even greater among younger Americans than it is for the nation as a whole,” especially by state and by region.63
Millennial Makeover authors Morley Winograd and Michael Hais also find that these children of the boomers differ from their parents and other generations in that they are more practical, civic-minded, optimistic, diverse, and embedded in social networks and groups, as well as more globally and internationally oriented. They are more favorably disposed to government and have almost a 2-to-1 identification with the Democratic Party. Indeed, their defection from Republican ranks is “aging” the GOP’s demographic profile: in 1997, 28 percent of GOP voters were over age fifty-five; by 2007, 41 percent were.64 This, in turn, is driving a generational divide in terms of the different issues emphasized by the two parties. The GOP has highly ranked issues of taxation, national security, immigration, and terrorism. Democrats have been focused more on economic security and inequality, the Iraq War, the environment, and Social Security and Medicare.65 The latter entitlements, of course, are growing nearer and dearer on a daily basis for aging baby boomers.
Aging boomers hardly seemed threatened by the power of under-thirty voters. (There were many anecdotal stories of adult children convincing boomer parents to vote for Obama.) Indeed, they had little to fear. The Obama-driven youth power movement, reborn after the election as “Organizing for America,” proved to be disorganized and ineffectual at promoting the Obama agenda, especially during the 2009–10 congressional health care battles.
Younger voters’ infatuation with Obama was ebbing by 2010. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wryly observed: “The most striking feature of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency was the amazing, young, Internet-enabled, grass-roots movement he mobilized to get elected. The most striking feature of Obama’s presidency a year later is how thoroughly that movement has disappeared.”66 (A Gallup poll conducted in midsummer 2010 found that Obama’s approval rating among those aged eighteen to twenty-nine years had fallen from 65 percent to 54 percent—an 11 percent drop compared to an 8 percent drop among all respondents from 53 percent to 46 percent).67
By the 2010 midterm elections Democratic tacticians were belatedly trying to revive the enthusiasm of these youth-based voting brigades. New York Times savvy political writer Matt Bai cynically suggested that the midterms were “a test for the real ground game” and that the true remobilization goal was the 2012 presidential campaign.68 But Democrats were scurrying to energize their youth-women-minorities base for another reason: to counter the rising influence of the Tea Party movement, driven, to a large extent by white, aging baby boomers.69
The origins of the still amorphous Tea Party movement lie primarily in strong antitax, anti–big government economic reactions against federal government “bailouts” of major corporations and against government “overreach” on health care reform. As a rebellion against “ruling class” efforts to collude and “manage” national problems, the Tea Party’s economic populism is clearly a byproduct of the class/political/cultural antagonism discussed above. However, one source of tension within the movement is the desire by some to add conservative religious and social concerns into the movement’s agenda. Another, less noticed, source of tension is the tacit acceptance of traditional Social Security and Medicare by its age fifty-plus foot soldiers versus the hard-line libertarian ideology of its younger theoreticians who want to radically restructure such programs.70
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the national Tea Party movement has political roots in California’s antitax, antigovernment populism that first crystallized in the 1978 “taxpayer revolt” with the successful tax-cutting ballot initiative Proposition 13. Recent data indicate that its sociological base is much the same: overwhelmingly white, middle and working class, and middle-aged or older.
A 2010 Pew report on escalating government mistrust contained an entire section on the Tea Party movement. Though the Tea Party movement has been difficult to study because of its fluid and disorganized structure, the Pew Center’s demographic analysis of attitudes toward the Tea Party reinforced a subsequent New York Times/CBS News poll’s findings of self-identified Tea Party supporters: they are overwhelmingly white and over age fifty—very much a baby boomer phenomenon.71
Nearly 30 percent of those responding to the Pew Center’s query were unaware of the Tea Party or had no opinion of it. Among those who were aware of the new movement, age, gender, party, and race affected opinions. Strong agreement with the Tea Party agenda increased with age: 33 percent of those over age sixty-five agreed with the movement’s agenda compared to 31 percent of the boomer demographic and only 9 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine. Thirty-six percent of men over age fifty were in agreement with the Tea Party but only 14 percent of women aged eighteen to forty-nine. Twenty-eight percent of whites were in agreement compared to 17 percent of Hispanics and 7 percent of blacks. The highest levels of agreement were among Republican college graduates, at 58 percent; Republicans over age fifty, at 54 percent; conservative Republicans, at 53 percent; and Republican men, at 48 percent. (Older, conservative male Republicans are overwhelmingly white.)72
A 2010 New York Times/CBS poll found similar patterns among self-identified Tea Party supporters: “The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.” Specifically, 89 percent were white, 59 percent were male, 46 percent were baby boomers (age forty-five to sixty-four), and another 29 percent were over age sixty-four. Fifty-four percent identified as Republican, 36 percent as Independent; 37 percent had a college degree or higher, while 33 percent indicated “some college”; 56 percent earned more than $50,000; 70 percent were married.73
The most remarkable aspect of the Times/CBS study was reporters’ follow-up questions in response to a glaring contradiction: despite the fierce antigovernment, antitax rhetoric, 62 percent of Tea Party identifiers agreed that Social Security and Medicare benefits were “worth the costs.” Some justified their current or potential benefits in terms of having paid into the systems. But a sixty-two-year-old baby boomer pondered the contradiction: “Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. . . . I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”74
Aging boomers in the Tea Party and other political venues will be forced to reconsider contradictory commitments to small government and to the old-age entitlements upon which a majority of boomers will be heavily dependent. As their job security, retirement savings, and housing values have dwindled or stagnated during the worst recession since the 1930s, Social Security and Medicare increasingly appear to be the ultimate retirement lifeboats in the unpredictable financial storms of global capitalism. And the only long-standing, reliable guardian of these entitlements is AARP.
But can AARP unite, or at least harness, the wide range of political responses to such issues by a divided boomer generation—especially in the wake of a demoralizing recession and after years of generational infighting?