I tend to enjoy argument, especially when it is with my father. For us, every discussion tends to turn into a debate, with every point suddenly vital and every position a vehement one. Typically, these debates focus on politics, but recently the exchanges have been more heated and more contentious. More than once in the past few weeks, we have been puzzled that our tempers could flare so intensely through a simple conversation.
Two weeks ago I cast my vote-by-mail ballot for Barack Obama in California's Democratic primary; last Tuesday my father voted for Hillary Clinton. On the issues, the two candidates have few distinguishing characteristics, and so far as I am concerned, either candidate would be preferable to the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain. And despite all our arguments, my father and I tend to agree, at least in theory, on most political issues.
It is quite probable that my father and I ended up voting for different candidates simply because of those slight "distinguishing characteristics" that define the subtle distinctions in each candidate's position. However, after all of our arguments, the real culprit has emerged: not single-payer health care or troop withdrawals, but the fundamental generational gap between Clinton and Obama, between older and younger voters and ultimately between my father and myself.
Clinton, the quintessential Baby Boomer, was born in 1947. She was in college in the mid-'60s and was 21 in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Her political career began immediately prior to the Reagan Revolution, and she has spent the last 20 or 30 years waging a valiant and hard-fought battle against partisan conservatism. She has stood tall against the "vast right-wing conspiracy," traded blows with the "Republican attack machine" and is by any measure an experienced and tested politician.
Obama, by contrast, was born in 1961, and is thus a generation removed. Though he has experienced, and even participated in, the divisive partisan politics of the past several decades, he is by no means defined by that experience. If anything, he has consistently articulated a desire to transcend that divisiveness and work with, not in spite of, the Republican Party. If the last seven years of an arrogant, unilateralist administration have taught us anything, it is that a continued insistence on being the president not to all Americans but to only a certain group of Americans-be they Republican or Democrat-is a recipe for guaranteed and unmitigated disaster, both at home and abroad.
My father, for all his great virtues, is still a man of his time and a product of his surroundings. As I have grown older, I have begun to recognize some of the varied differences between the two of us, not just in belief but in the way we think.
He was born in 1948, spent his college years at UCLA during the turbulence of the Vietnam War and was saved from the draft, and possibly Vietnam, by only a handful of draws in the lottery system. He experienced the troubles of the Nixon administration, the impotence of the Carter administration and the conservative heyday of the Reagan administration. But while he was born at the start of the Cold War and the unilateral good-versus-evil mentality that characterized it, I was born at the end.
Several months after my birth the Berlin Wall came down; I remember only vaguely the tense, vitriolic tone of the Lewinsky scandal during the late '90s.
My political views have evolved during the Bush administration, of course, and for quite a while I felt very fervently that what this country needed was a progressive firestorm to shut down any conservative agenda for the next 30 years and clean up the mess left behind. But this sort of knee-jerk partisanship is precisely what is wrong with American politics today, and young voters like myself are searching desperately for a way out.
The promise, and the legacy, of an Obama presidency might be in the liberal platform he pursues, but I think its real power will come in the inauguration of a new mentality in American politics, a mentality of compromise, of openness to new ideas and of acceptance. The fight for a progressive, liberal America has been a noble one, and the values that defined that fight are truly worthy.
But the special hubris of running a country solely for yourself and your supporters can end only when we have a president courageous enough to work with his opponents, not around them. It will only end when we have a president who will move beyond partisanship, beyond Democratic or Republican presidencies and become a president for all Americans.