President-elect is idealistic realist

It has been 16 years since Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, took office. To many people, Barack Obama symbolizes a new generation.

To a number of social analysts, historians, bloggers and ordinary Americans, Jan. 20 will symbolize the passing of an entire generation: the baby boomers.

Generational change. A passing of the torch. The terms have been thrown around with frequency as the moment nears for Obama to take the oath of office. And yet the reference is not to Obama's relatively young age — at 47, he's only tied for fifth place on the youngest presidents list.

Rather, it's a sense that a cultural era is ending, one dominated by the boomers, many of whom came of age in the '60s and experienced the bitter divisions caused by the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, social change, sexual freedoms and more.

Those experiences, the theory goes, led boomers, born in 1946-64, to become deeply motivated by ideology and mired in decades-old conflicts. And Obama is an example of a new pragmatism: idealistic but realistic, post-partisan, unthreatened by dissent, eager and able to come up with new ways to solve problems.

"Obama is one of those people who was raised post-Vietnam and really came of age in the '80s," said Steven Cohen, professor of public administration at Columbia University. "It's a huge generational change, and a new kind of politics. He's trying to be a problem-solver by not getting wrapped up in the right-left ideology underlying them."

Technically a boomer

Obama, born in 1961, is technically a boomer. But he long has sought to draw a generational contrast between himself and the politicians before him.

"I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage," he wrote of the 2000 and 2004 elections in The Audacity of Hope.

It's been a while since historians spoke of generational change in Washington. Fully 16 years have passed since Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, took office. Before that, seven straight presidents, from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush, were part of the World War II generation.

"It may be technically correct to call him a boomer," said Douglas War shaw, a New York media executive who, at age 49, is part of whatever cohort Obama is in. "And it's in the Zeitgeist to call him a Gen Xer. But I think he's more like a generational bridge." He said Obama got where he is by "brilliantly leveraging the communication behaviors of post-boomers," with a campaign waged across the Web, on cell phones and on social networking sites.

One analyst of popular culture believes Obama definitely symbolizes a new generation — just not one connected to his birth year.

"I think it's hilarious that everyone wants to categorize people by their birth year, especially now, a time when our parents are on Facebook," said Montana Miller of Bowling Green State University. Obama, she says, represents a generational shift in ways less tangible than age."