Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

They were born within 16 months of each other at the dawn of the biggest demographic bubble in American history. They grew up on Ed Sullivan and Elvis. And now on either side of age 70, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are waging a battle that nobody would have expected just a few years ago: They’re competing to restore the presidency to the wrinkled grasp of the baby boom. Eight years ago, the election of Barack Obama seemed to signal a tidal change in the culture of American politics. Finally, the generation that battled over Vietnam and civil rights, that gave us the modern self-help movement and Woodstock, was relaxing its grip on political power. But no: It’s 2016 and the boomers are back. Clinton and Trump, born in 1946 and 1947, are ur-boomers, certified members of the earliest, most powerful, most divisive part of a cohort that has always been most famous for being preoccupied with itself.

It’s not just narcissism these two have in common with the broad-brush stereotypes of their generation. Neither may fit the image of the middle-class revolutionary tuning in, turning on and dropping out in the midst of Vietnam turmoil, but they both refract the tensions of their cultural moment. Clinton blends the activist politics of her day with the strait-laced Father Knows Best 1950s that first shaped this generation; Trump is a glitzed-up product of the Mad Men ’60s from which the boomers emerged, a playboy who pays lip service to “traditional values” while embodying nothing of the sort.


As befits the generation that made “Me” famous, the revenge of the boomers in 2016 has taken on the feel of a rear-guard action; a group once noted for optimism, one that looked to build a new kind of America, has now soured on the country’s promise. Today, in fact, boomers are the most pessimistic generation, according to surveys over the past decade, with as many as 80 percent of them dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country. In a strange way, a generation headed to the sunset might just strike the right tone for this moment in national life.

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The tug of war over 2016’s messaging would be instantly familiar to anyone watching the news in, say, 1968. Trump’s call to “make America great again” is an appeal to a kind of Eisenhower-era normalcy and conformity, when the country was whiter, blander and safer (if you discount the risk of nuclear annihilation). He has given febrile voice to the unhappy heirs of what Richard Nixon once called “the great silent majority,” vowing to take a tough law-and-order approach not only to the streets of the nation’s cities but to its very borders as well. He’s nothing if not backward-looking.

Clinton’s pledge to “make America whole again,” meanwhile, is a hymn to the ’60s idealism of the Great Society. Her assertion that “instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers” is a call to the women, blacks, Latinos and LGBT Americans who are the beneficiaries of the movements for social and economic justice that the ’60s spawned, and whose loyalty she’ll need in the fall.

In a strange way, a pessimistic generation headed to the sunset might just strike the right tone for this moment in national life.

In some ways, Clinton and Trump scramble the typical boomer tropes. Clinton opposed the Vietnam War but is now seen as a hawkish interventionist and the embodiment of the establishment. Trump was a son of privilege who neither served in nor protested against Vietnam, and now stands as the tribune of the working stiff, warning against the dangers of immigrants and foreign entanglements.

But one thing they have incontrovertibly in common with all the boomers: They’re old. Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president. Clinton would come close. In a twist surely unflattering for a generation that vowed never to trust anyone over 30, the battle of the boomers is now a contest between people who by all rights ought to be settling nicely into retirement instead of barnstorming the country in private jets, pretending to be wise to their millennial aides’ Snapchatting ways. Their policy concerns often reflect this reality: Trump, for example, has suggested he would not touch Social Security, which some of his younger GOP rivals were willing to rethink, and Clinton has proposed increasing research into Alzheimer’s and new tax credits for family caregivers looking after adult relatives who are elderly, disabled or chronically ill. A boomer presidency now amounts to victory for the AARP set.

But more than old, they’re sour. Clinton’s 1969 Wellesley commencement speech was a quintessential new-beginning vision, famously declaring, “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.” That’s not her anymore.

A 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted just as the oldest boomers were about to turn 65, found that boomers were uniquely dissatisfied, compared with both older and younger generations. One in five said their standard of living was lower than their parents’ was at the same age (compared with just 14 percent among all non-boomer adults). One in three predicted their children would not enjoy as high a standard of living as they had then (compared with just 1 in 5 of non-boomers).

“The iconic image of the baby boom generation is a 1960s-era snapshot of an exuberant, long-haired, rebellious young adult,” the Pew report found. “That portrait wasn’t entirely accurate even then, but it’s hopelessly out of date now. This famously huge cohort of Americans finds itself in a funk as it approaches old age.”

Disgruntled older voters with little stake in the future can have dramatic effects on an entire country: Britain’s recent vote to leave the European Union was driven largely by older voters who’d grown unhappy with what they saw their country becoming. America, too, is living through a cranky moment. So maybe it’s no accident that Trump and Clinton, who share not only their age but historic unfavorable ratings, have emerged at the forefront of an election cycle notable for its pessimism and divisions.

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Coming at the end of the presidency of a man who was elected in 2008 at age 47, the boomer restoration isn’t just a sign of a nation marching in place—it’s a step backward, a rarity in American history. Not every president has been younger than the last, but with the exception of Ronald Reagan, every president elected in modern times has come from a generational cohort the same as or younger than his predecessor’s.

Obama, born in 1961, is technically a boomer, but grew up too late to be drafted into its generational wars; he always held himself at a kind of skeptical distance from the generation of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, our two previous ur-boomer presidents. “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,” he wrote in 2006, when he was a freshman senator contemplating a presidential campaign. “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.”

At this point, it’s not clear what can. Trump and Clinton are arguably the most divisive national party leaders of the post Cold War. The millennial generation now exceeds that of boomers in the overall population, with about 75.4 million members ages 18 to 34, compared with 74.9 million boomers ages 51 to 69, and it roughly equals the boomers’ voting strength. Millennials are a vastly more diverse lot than their elders, and those shifting demographics make it much less likely that a national campaign as racially divisive as Trump’s could be successfully waged in the future.

But if the solution lies in the first millennial president, we might have to wait a while. Maybe the Gen Xers, known for their tolerance, independence and entrepreneurial spirit, will finally topple the long, contentious reign of the people who brought us the Beatles and the Weather Underground. Chelsea Clinton and Donald Trump, Jr.: a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.