“There’s something going on out there,” said Barack Obama in New Hampshire this week. “Something’s stirring in the wind.”
The echo of Bob Dylan’s anthem was apt. Just as a younger generation overturned the assumptions and preconceptions of their parents in the 1960’s, the election of 2008 has become, virtually overnight, a referendum on the decisions and encrusted political habits of baby boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964, many of whom were in fact singing along to Dylan and the Beatles 40 years ago.
Whether Barack Obama gets the Democratic nomination, his candidacy represents not only a profound landmark of racial healing but also a generational milestone, the introduction into the political process of millions of young voters who have been galvanized and magnetized by his message, and who are making it clear they are quite comfortable with taking the reins from their elders and don’t intend to wait for party bosses and pollsters to tell them when it’s their turn. It was young voters, those under 50, who propelled the 46-year-old senator to his strong win in Iowa. It is young voters who waited for hours in New Hampshire to see the candidate and hear what he had to say. And each time one of Mr. Obama’s opponents tells him he is not ready to lead, that he needs to wait his turn, it is young voters who reject that argument, hearing in it an older generation’s arrogant unwillingness to accept that a new way of thinking can ever be better than the old way. The surge of independent voters flocking to Mr. Obama is also indicative of the younger generation’s frustration with partisan polarization, name calling and endless gridlock.
As the primary battle continues across the country, the conversation will largely be driven by these new young voters, voters whom the pundits said would never turn out to actually vote, because they were too lazy, too cynical, too self-absorbed.
But the voters proved the pundits wrong. Democracy, it seems, is alive and well.
