is here, in his own words,
The Audacity of Hope, p 23.
For the (Boomer) generation of leaders who followed, raised in relative comfort, different experiences yielded a different attitude toward politics. In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, 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. The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans.
The Election of 2000 was a Baby Boom revenge plot? Today, when the President forlornly contemplates a return to the 'Gilded Age', he might reconsider whether the thirty year, concerted, relentless putsch to roll back both the New Deal and the Square Deal was a psychodrama of college grudges.
At the time, Andrew Sullivan, with his unrivaled gifts for getting it wrong, found rapture:
Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters. Is Iraq Vietnam? Who really won in 2000? Which side are you on in the culture wars? These questions have divided the Baby Boomers and distorted our politics. One candidate could transcend them.
... Obama's candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/12/goodbye-to-all-that-why-obama-matters/6445/1/Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce. A truce? A truce in the endless war to, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, "enthrone ... an invisible Government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people"?
The President's deepest beliefs are founded on the words "E pluribus unum": Out of many, one. As Rupert Murdoch, slices, dices and fricassees the President for fun, profit and power, he could reply ' Out of one, many. Here Glenn, serve the President a nice cup of Tea.'
The baubles of a putsch are its tactics: divide and conquer. Obama paid close attention to the battles, the tactics, the strategy, but not the war.
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