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Each Generation's New Technology Changes Poltical Landscape

In 1984, a Democratic senator from Colorado named Gary Hart sought the White House by using the phrase "new generation" a dozen times in his standard stump speech. His target was the baby boom generation, a group of about 76 million born between the years 1946 and 1964. Mr. Hart didn't win a presidential nomination, but the themes he explored formed the leitmotif of a quarter-century of presidential campaigns.

John McCain is not a baby boomer, and Barack Obama is barely one, but the untold story of the 2008 election may be that it isn't about baby boomers at all -- not about their issues, not about their neuroses, not about their demons, not about their dreams, not about their experiences (though maybe about their Social Security payments, if anyone dares approach that problem).

Some columns are about facts, some about opinions. This one's about a theory. It is proffered by Morley Winograd, who was a senior policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore (a classic baby boomer) and Michael D. Hais, retired vice president of entertainment research at the Frank N. Magid Associates communications research firm. One look at their pictures on the dust jacket of their new book, "Millennial Makeover" (Rutgers University Press, $24.95), will tell you that these theorists aren't Millennials -- which they define as those born between 1982 and 2003.

The theory is that this is the time for another important shift in American politics, a transfer of power and political themes brought about by dramatic generational and technological change. Before you snicker and conclude that this is a bunch of guys looking for an intellectual analysis to explain Mr. Obama's presidential campaign, with its e-mail alerts and its Internet money machine, consider this:

From 1896 to 1928, the Republicans won seven of nine presidential elections. From 1932 to 1964 the Democrats won seven of nine presidential elections. From 1968 to 2004, the Republicans won seven of 10 presidential elections.

A few words about history and politics: Just because something happened in the past doesn't mean that it will happen again. Just because three sets of nine or 10 elections can be neatly clustered together doesn't mean that the next set of nine or 10 elections will conform. What is past is prologue, but not predictive.

Still, if we agree that radio (which helps explain Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sway) and television (which was central to John F. Kennedy's -- and, when trained on Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, helped end Lyndon B. Johnson's reign and stymied Hubert H. Humphrey's campaign) were transformative elements in American politics, then how can we deny the potential political power of the information revolution and the Internet-based social networks?

"These people grew up with the Internet. It's always on, it's always with them, and they use it to share information about what they're doing and what they're thinking," says Mr. Winograd, the executive director of the University of Southern California's Institute for Communication Technology Management. "As a result, the way they make decisions is to find out what their peers think and reach a consensus. They're not into expert wisdom and people with long resumes. They're much more likely to respond to messages in social networks like MySpace or Facebook than to traditional campaign messages."

Which is very likely why the Obama campaign has its own MyBO networking site.

The Millennials are a big generation, almost 100 million in all, bigger than the baby-boom generation that was supposed to be the largest of all, the one that was supposed to have created chaos and change as it bulldozed through the society and culture. (Check out this silly, overblown phrase on the baby boomers from a story on "The Hart Generation" from The New York Times Magazine of May 27, 1984: "one of the most important forces in this nation's social history in this century." The dumbo who wrote it was ... me.)

About a third of the Millennials are eligible to vote in November. There could be as many Millennials at the polls on Election Day as senior citizens. Their attitudes on issues are quite different from the generations that preceded them.

"They tend to favor government intervention in the economy," says Mr. Hais. "They tend to be multilateralists in foreign policy. They tend not to be concerned with social issues. Those things are decided for them: They're not upset about gay marriage, for example."

There is more: At this point they identify as Democrats by a 2-to-1 margin and are the first generation in four in where more are willing to say they are liberals than that they are conservatives, according to the authors.

All of this is not to say that Obama has a lock on these voters and that a new set of Democratic administrations is inevitable. McCain can still win them; his cause is helped, for example, because Millennials are not pacifists and are preoccupied with national security. That's right in the McCain wheelhouse.

Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais say that history repeats itself and that this is time for another generational change. Maybe yes, maybe no. But there's no denying there is something new and different in the air, or more precisely on the Web, and that, after all those years of talking about how the new technology would make a difference, there actually is emerging a new politics.

Now go to the Internet and search for "new politics," and you will find an entry for a book by James M. Perry called "The New Politics." It will not surprise you to learn that the subtitle is "The Expanding Technology of Political Manipulation." But it may surprise you to discover that Mr. Perry published the book in 1968, the beginning of the last cluster of Republican victories.

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Related Topics: election 2008 | johnson | mccain | obama | roosevelt |

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