The true fault line of the Democratic

nomination battle isn't Clinton's gender

or Obama's pigmentation,

both themes that the press obsesses upon

The demographic earthquake that quivers

under the surface of the '08 campaign is generational

When a reporter asked Obama last year if

he had ever done illegal drugs, the senator answered

"I inhaled frequently. That was the point"

He further volunteered that he had tried cocaine

His lack of shame reminded us of ourselves

In contrast, the Clintons have repeatedly shown

condescension and hostility toward younger Americans

The constant drumbeat by Clinton, 60, and her campaign to tag Obama, 46, as lacking the experience to be president has turned the '08 campaign, on the Democratic primary side, into a generational war.

Obama has fired back, relishing the role of enfant terrible. As the gap narrows between the two in public opinion surveys, members of Clinton's baby boom generation will be confronted with their own, perhaps final, defining moment:

Will 2008 mark the final sell-out in which they confirm that they are as pigheaded as they once believed their parents to be? Or will the presidential primaries bring a generational homecoming in which they willingly pass the torch that their own elders tried to withhold from them?

For the sixties generation, it's déjà vu time.

The New Generation Gap [Original]

The true fault line of next year's Democratic nomination battle will not tremble because of Clinton's gender or Obama's pigmentation, both themes that the press obsesses upon.

The demographic earthquake that quivers under the surface of the '08 campaign is generational.

Already, some boomers are squirming defensively over Obama's statements that a Clinton nomination will prolong the never-resolving, now calcified, arguments between right and left wings of the sixties generation and further stall authentic change.

Some take umbrage at the suggestion that their generation--represented politically over the past 15 years by the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - should cede the reigns of power to the next.

Some former youths that once cheered our late friend Abbie Hoffman's credo of "don't trust anyone over 30," now sound like their clueless parents of yore, scolding in response to the vocalization of today's generation gap.

"Obama can kiss my hippy ass," snapped a Daily Kos diarist on November 9, offended by the junior senator of Illinois' recent statement to Fox News that:

"I think there's no doubt we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton can't deliver on and part of it is generational.

"Senator Clinton and others, they've been fighting since the '60s, and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Tom Hayden, SDS-founder-turned-politician, is wincing, too. He wrote an open letter to Obama last week in The Huffington Post, imploring:

"What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency."

Among Hayden's gripes is that Obama isn't running a campaign based on identity politics:

"[T]he deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president."

Omigod! Obama is black? Why he didn't tell us? We had no idea!

Those with historic memory know that Abbie considered Tom to be out-of-step with generational politics back then when they were quarreling young co-defendants in the Chicago 8 case.

But even Hayden seems pulled in two directions, lecturing Obama: "[Y]ou could change America's dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect."

Neocon-turned-war-critic Andrew Sullivan made a similar generational argument for Obama in a cover story for the latest issue of The Atlantic.

But the focus on "rebranding" America misses the rationale for Obama's candidacy altogether:

It's not the colored face that Obama would put on the USA brand, but his (and for many of us, our) generations' differing perception that a deeply flawed "product" has to be fixed rather than merely dressed up in new artificial packaging.

This generational fault line will shake more forcefully as the January 3 Iowa caucuses and subsequent primaries approach.

Still, a great many boomers of conscience share the younger generations' disappointment in how their own hopes were dashed.

They may find Obama's generational challenge to signal not the defeat of their original ideals but, rather, their fulfillment, or at least a catalyst to reopen the path.

The disillusion that so many of us under 50 have experienced crystallized with the failure of the first Clinton White House to make good on its own generational pitch after 1992.

Many of us watched our elders drift from preaching peace and love and anti-capitalism to obsessing with consumerism, escapist spiritual fads and hedge funds.

We kept as our own many of the counter-cultural pleasures that were won in the sixties (every generation since then has embraced sexual liberation and marijuana, among other so-called vices).

The distrust and mockery of authority, the worry over the natural environment, and the strong distaste for war and discrimination that are among the proud legacies of the sixties youth movements.

But many, probably most of us, deeply resent that we find ourselves trapped in a very limited set of political choices calcified by the boomer generation--Republican and Democrat - now in power.