The Anti-Boomer Candidate

JOHN McCAIN was in a foul mood Thursday morning. His campaign bus, which usually rings with the sound of McCain cracking jokes and reporters singing the “Hallelujah” Chorus, was subdued. McCain snapped at one reporter, and the rest of his conversation was clipped. The problem was obvious. Despite huge, boisterous crowds, there was a sense that out in medialand the campaign was being buried under a barrage of TV and radio attack ads. The reporters’ questions turned to the negative Bush ads, the negative McCain ads, Bush’s money, the money McCain was about to raise from Washington lobbyists. McCain wasn’t having fun, and there wasn’t much straight talk. He complained sourly about the “push polls” the Bush campaign was using. “It’s something I never thought their campaign would stoop to. It’s real bottom-feeding.” Campaigns use push polls to spread negative information about their opponents to voters under the guise of taking telephone surveys.

The first event was a town meeting in Spartanburg, where McCain was supposed to deliver a major education reform address. He has a tendency to drone through prepared texts, but he was animated and effective this time.

The question and answer period was typical of a McCain event. A teacher and Common Cause activist named Nancy Snow stood up and said she’d driven all night from New Hampshire to come and say how much she admired him. Another woman cited his war record and asked, “What made you love your country so much?” A former Forbes supporter got up and ripped the IRS. A Guadalcanal veteran lambasted Clinton-Gore ethics. McCain answered with a riff he normally uses to start his events, paying homage to the World War II generation. He cited Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, and then lamented that these veterans are “leaving us” at a rate of 30,000 a month. He said it’s a disgrace that the United States hasn’t kept the health-care commitments it made to this generation, and concluded by telling the Guadalcanal vet, “You honor us with your presence.”

Then a woman named Donna Duren stood up. She described how hard it was to explain the Lewinsky scandal to her 13-year-old son. But, she said, her son had found a hero, McCain. The boy was now planning to go to the Naval Academy and become an engineer. But, the night before, while she was doing housework, the phone rang and her son Chris, a Boy Scout, answered it upstairs. A few minutes later he came down to her in tears. The caller had been a Bush push poller and had apparently told the boy that McCain was a “liar and a fraud.”

“I was so livid I could barely speak,” Duren said. But she explained to her son about push polling. And the boy apparently responded, “But I thought Governor Bush was a Christian?”

The woman finished her account and there was silence. As political drama, it could only have had more emotional impact if the boy had been a leukemia patient with three weeks to live.

McCain was taken aback. His sense of honor, which is his greatest virtue and his greatest source of political capital, had been affronted. “What you have just told me will have a profound influence on me. The disillusionment of a young boy is something I don’t take lightly.” He stumbled through the rest of the meeting and then gathered all the reporters for a scrum on the lawn outside.

“I can’t believe that someone from a good family such as George Bush wouldn’t stop this,” McCain said, calling for a moratorium on negative campaigning. Then there was a question about the education reform plan he had just offered. McCain tried haltingly to answer before breaking off, “I’m a little rattled, frankly, by what happened to that young boy.” It was one of those moments when the candidate’s sincere emotional response perfectly coincides with his political self-interest. He was playing it big.

Then we piled into the bus. McCain went elsewhere, and we reporters headed off across the state. A few hours later, as we were getting our first word of Bush’s reaction to the episode — “If I found out it was somebody in my camp, they aren’t going to be in my camp anymore. . . . Sounds like [McCain] spends a lot of time thinking out loud about my campaign” — a state trooper drove up behind the bus and pulled us over.

We hadn’t been speeding. The state trooper was a former Marine who had idolized McCain since high school. He saw the signs on the bus and pulled it over so he could meet the senator. But McCain wasn’t on the bus, and the trooper suddenly found himself on the side of the highway surrounded by cameramen, sound booms, and reporters. He begged us not to take his picture, but no luck. The next day his story was on the front page of the statewide paper, his conduct referred to the office of internal affairs.

The state trooper story ended up overshadowing the push poll boy in the in-state news coverage. But McCain’s reaction to the boy is the more revealing about his campaign. When you are following the campaign, you get the sensation that there is something odd about it you can’t quite put your finger on. But at an event like the town meeting in Spartanburg, the oddness finally comes clear.

American culture is usually refracted through the prism of the baby boomers. It is their experiences, traumas, and quests for fulfillment that take center stage. We’re all so used to boomer narcissism, we no longer even notice how many of our movies, television programs, and political campaigns are geared toward this group. But the McCain campaign almost never talks about the baby boomers.

The McCain campaign talks about the World War II generation, and it talks about the current generation of students. In meeting after meeting, McCain talks about inspiring the young and honoring the old. Aside from his homage to the Greatest Generation, the one riff he highlights at every single event is the one about getting young people involved as active citizens. “The number one mission of the president of the United States is to inspire a new generation of young Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” he declares again and again.

We’ve just had our first baby boomer administration. And, to put it mildly, the behavior of the Clinton-Gore administration indicts the boomers. The Clintonites displayed the flaws that have long been associated with this group: self-absorption, selfishness, a taste for immediate gratification, a tendency to be too easy on oneself. We’ve just had a decade of Newt Gingrich, too, with the same qualities. And we’ve had a decade of Hillary Clinton trying to create a politics of meaning for her boomer cohort. John McCain’s manner and rhetoric are in stark contrast to all that.

John McCain is running as an anti-boomer. Though he is only a decade or so older than the top edge of that generation, his term as a POW marks him as someone whose life experience has been dramatically different from that of the average boomer. In fact, when you hear people talk about McCain’s war record, they talk about him as if he were a World War II vet who just happened to serve in the Vietnam theater. He fits none of the stereotypes of the Vietnam soldiers laid down by Apocalypse Now or Platoon or The Deer Hunter. He fits the pattern of the World War II generation. And on the stump he is much more comfortable with the young and the old than he is with those in the middle. He can tell geezer jokes with the oldsters, and he can go to MTV events and be cool with the kids. But he is less ebullient with those in between.

The McCain campaign isn’t about self-expression or self-discovery. The candidate doesn’t need to make up heroic rites of passage about the day he headed off to school. Instead, he describes almost every issue as a conflict between sacrifice, which is what the World War II experience now symbolizes, and immediate gratification, which is what Woodstock and yuppiedom symbolize.

McCain is explicit about this when talking about his tax plan. The Bush campaign gives you a big tax cut. That’s immediate gratification, McCain says. But, he continues, America should use the money instead to secure Social Security for the younger generation and to pay down the debt so they won’t be left with our debt costs. “You might think people would say about the surplus, ‘Give me my money back,'” McCain tells his crowds, “but people like you say we have an obligation to the next generation of Americans. Let’s pay down the debt. . . . It’s a sense of unselfishness. It’s a sign of the greatness of America.”

On issue after issue, McCain crusades against immediate gratification: against pork-barrel spending, against Internet porn, against the Clinton scandals, against big business lobbying. “When you serve a cause greater than your self-interest there is great redemption associated with that,” he told students at Clemson. “America is the noblest country in history, and the greatest privilege we can have is to serve it.”

As usual, John McCain is everything and its opposite. He is a Senate insider and also a reforming outsider, a policy maverick and also a man with many conventional Republican views, a crusader for sacrifice, but also a politician who can pander to pleas for increased benefits and a lower retirement age.

But this anti-boomer message is real. It plays with the old, and it obviously plays with the young. McCain’s college crowds are enormous and devoted. This is a style of youthful political idealism that one usually sees only in the Democratic party, but McCain’s kids are enthusiastic and they are conservative. The Clemson audience cheered his pro-life riff. They cheered when he condemned the gay lifestyle.

And one suspects the anti-boomer style may even play with the boomers. This is a cohort that is now approaching 50. They are thinking a lot about their parents, who are dying off. They are seeing their kids enter college. They are getting to an age where the language of self-expression and perpetual self-discovery gets a little tiresome. John McCain’s hard experiences stand in contrast to their own good fortune.

After a prolonged period of affluence, maybe the electorate is drawn to JFK-style calls for sacrifice. On the ground here in South Carolina, the race feels extraordinarily close, with a strange disconnect between all the negative media warfare and the lofty face-to-face campaigning. And on a broader level, maybe the national obsession with the lives and obsessions of the baby boomers is finally ending. Maybe our long national nightmare is over.