The Anti-Boomer Candidate
BROOKS, DAVID
The Anti-Boomer Candidate We've had our first baby boomer president. McCain wants to save us from another. BY DAVID BROOKS Spartanburg, South Carolina John McCain was in a foul mood Thursday...
...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...
...America is the noblest country in history, and the greatest privilege we can have is to serve it...
...BY DAVID BROOKS Spartanburg, South Carolina John McCain was in a foul mood Thursday morning...
...They are thinking a lot about their parents, who are dying off...
...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...
...He fits the pattern of the World War II generation...
...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...
...His sense of honor, which is his greatest virtue and his greatest source of political capital, had been affronted...
...Then there was a question about the education reform plan he had just offered...
...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...
...Campaigns use push polls to spread negative information about their opponents to voters under the guise of taking telephone surveys...
...Maybe our long national nightmare is over...
...Another woman cited his war record and asked, "What made you love your country so much...
...A few minutes later he came down to her in tears...
...McCain answered with a riff he normally uses to start his events, paying homage to the World War II generation...
...It's a sense of unselfishness...
...It's a sign of the greatness of America...
...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...
...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...
...They are getting to an age where the language of self-expression and perpetual self-discovery gets a little tiresome...
...McCain went elsewhere, and we reporters headed off across the state...
...The problem was obvious...
...They are seeing their kids enter college...
...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...
...This is a cohort that is now approaching 50...
...John McCain's hard experiences stand in contrast to their own good fortune...
...He can tell geezer jokes with the oldsters, and he can go to MTV events and be cool with the kids...
...His campaign bus, which usually rings with the sound of McCain cracking jokes and reporters singing the "Hallelujah" Chorus, was subdued...
...John McCain is running as an anti-boomer...
...He complained sourly about the "push polls" the Bush campaign was using...
...The caller had been a Bush push poller and had apparently told the boy that McCain was a "liar and a fraud...
...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...
...American culture is usually refracted through the prism of the baby boomers...
...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 tried haltingly to answer before breaking off, "I'm a little rattled, frankly, by what happened to that young boy...
...But this anti-boomer message is real...
...After a prolonged period of affluence, maybe the electorate is drawn to JFK-style calls for sacrifice...
...Then a woman named Donna Duren stood up...
...Then we piled into the bus...
...As political drama, it could only have had more emotional impact if the boy had been a leukemia patient with three weeks to live...
...It is their experiences, traumas, and quests for fulfillment that take center stage...
...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...
...He stumbled through the rest of the meeting and then gathered all the reporters for a scrum on the lawn outside...
...McCain's college crowds are enormous and devoted...
...The next day his story was on the front page of the statewide paper, his conduct referred to the office of internal affairs...
...And, to put it mildly, the behavior of the Clinton-Gore administration indicts the boomers...
...But she explained to her son about push polling...
...And one suspects the anti-boomer style may even play with the boomers...
...When you serve a cause greater than your self-interest there is great redemption associated with that," he told students at Clemson...
...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...
...The Clemson audience cheered his pro-life riff...
...it's something i never thought their campaign would stoop to...
...I was so livid I could barely speak," Duren said...
...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...
...But, the night before, while she was doing housework, the phone rang and her son Chris, a Boy Scout, answered it upstairs...
...McCain is explicit about this when talking about his tax plan...
...It was one of those moments when the candidate's sincere emotional response perfectly coincides with his political self-interest...
...It plays with the old, and it obviously plays with the young...
...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...
...And on a broader level, maybe the national obsession with the lives and obsessions of the baby boomers is finally ending...
...John McCain's manner and rhetoric are in stark contrast to all that...
...And the boy apparently responded, "But I thought Governor Bush was a Christian...
...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...
...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...
...Let's pay down the debt...
...McCain snapped at one reporter, and the rest of his conversation was clipped...
...He was playing it big...
...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...
...But McCain's reaction to the boy is the more revealing about his campaign...
...It's real bottom-feed ing...
...She described how hard it was to explain the Lewinsky scandal to her 13-year-old son...
...A former Forbes supporter got up and ripped the IRS...
...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...
...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 a decade of Newt Gingrich, too, with the same qualities...
...The disillusionment of a young boy is something I don't take lightly...
...He saw the signs on the bus and pulled it over so he could meet the senator...
...McCain was taken aback...
...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...
...He fits none of the stereotypes of the Vietnam soldiers laid down by Apocalypse Now or Platoon or The Deer Hunter...
...He has a tendency to David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The question and answer period was typical of a McCain event...
...A Guadalcanal veteran lambasted Clinton-Gore ethics...
...But he is less ebullient with those in between...
...The Bush campaign gives you a big tax cut...
...But the McCain campaign almost never talks about the baby boomers...
...He begged us not to take his picture, but no luck...
...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...
...drone through prepared texts, but he was animated and effective this time...
...The McCain campaign isn't about self-expression or self-discovery...
...What you have just told me will have a profound influence on me...
...And we've had a decade of Hillary Clinton trying to create a politics of meaning for her boomer cohort...
...And on the stump he is much more comfortable with the young and the old than he is with those in the middle...
...On issue after issue, McCain crusades against immediate gratification: against pork-barrel spending, against Internet porn, against the Clinton scandals, against big business lobbying...
...The first event was a town meeting in Spartanburg, where McCain was supposed to deliver a major education reform address...
...They cheered when he condemned the gay lifestyle...
...We've just had our first baby boomer administration...
...The reporters' questions turned to the negative Bush , ads, the negative McCain ads, Bush's money, the money McCain was about to raise fjJ from Washington lobbyists...
...The state trooper story ended up overshadowing the push poll boy in the in-state news coverage...
...As usual, John McCain is everything and its opposite...
...The state trooper was a former Marine who had idolized McCain since high school...
...We hadn't been speeding...
...McCain wasn't having fun, and there wasn't much straight talk...
...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, she said, her son had found a hero, McCain...
...The boy was now planning to go to the Naval Academy and become an engineer...
...That's immediate gratification, McCain says...
...But at an event like the town meeting in Spar-tanburg, the oddness finally comes clear...
...The candidate doesn't need to make up heroic rites of passage about the day he headed off to school...
...The woman finished her account and there was silence...
...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...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 22
