Word: boomerism
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...baby boomer slouching toward codgerization, the Obama victory was not so much about his generation - but the kids two generations behind him, the college kids and recent graduates, blissfully color-blind, who spent patient months as organizers out in the most rural counties. Obama would pay tribute to these organizers at each of his events, calling them to the stage, giving them props - and it was surprising how often the local residents in places like Algona and Mt. Pleasant would mention to me how extraordinary these kids were. They reminded me, in classic, solipsistic boomer fashion, of my own generation...
...year political participation was, for once, mandatory. And a very clear message was sent: Iowa, at least, was ready for a new generation of leadership. That had been Obama's intent from the start. In my earliest conversations with him, he had expressed frustration with the perennial, divisive baby boomer political battles - "the dorm fights of the '60s," he called them - and he had a perfect foil in Hillary Clinton, whose husband had been the first baby boomer President and whose tenure, in the 1990s, had been marked by a heathen contentiousness (most of it the fault of Republican extremists...
...played a great drunk on TV's Bewitched and a range of comic characters on sitcoms like Hogan's Heroes and The Bob Newhart Show. But any baby boomer knows comedic character actor Dick Wilson as Mr. Whipple, the beleaguered grocer in toilet-paper ads who begs of customers, "Please don't squeeze the Charmin." The iconic ad campaign, which ran from 1964 to 1985, rocketed Wilson into pop-culture history--and national fame. "Everybody says, 'Where did they find you?'" the veteran actor told a reporter in 1985. "I say I was never lost...
When the first baby boomer filed for Social Security in mid-October, chills must have coursed along Laurence Kotlikoff's spine. For years the Boston University economist, among others, has been warning of our pending financial crisis--the burden of Social Security and health care for our largest generation on the shoulders of a diminishing proportion of workers. "We're creating our own fiscal catastrophe," Kotlikoff said in 2004. At the same time, businesses have been desperate to contain rising health-care premiums. Three years later, Kotlikoff is still determinedly on message--and offers his own radical cure...
...Arthur Rice, Westerville, Ohio It's the 40th anniversary of 1968 next year. And all but one of the presidential candidates-Barack Obama is the exception-are people who came of age during that time. That decade was the first full-throated roar of the baby boomer generation...