An America "where our children already live and our parents will never really know."

[DeepModem Mom]

I have had the idea from the day Obama won our nomination that the winner of this Election would depend on how far into a tectonic generational shift we have progressed. I posted an article yesterday about the battle for Ohio. The owner of a small restaurant was quoted as saying that there was a "giant generational divide." All of the young people who worked in her kitchen were for Obama. Older people were mostly for McCain. I was reminded of the divide again listening to the oldsters on "Morning Joe" talking about Obama's need to "connect." Obama has "connected" to an entire generation, in the words of one GenYer close to me, "without even trying."

Gen Y is a massive generation, larger than the Boomer Generation. I have found any attempt to "stereotype" a generation, citing any study, is met with some unexplainable primal outcry and scorn. So I won't go into the little bit I know about generational differences beyond saying that this generation is, for example, indisputably more multicultural than those before it. In any case, these young people are Obama's. If enough of them (and African Americans and Hispanics) vote, Obama will have the new electorate he seeks, and needs, to elect him President. In my view, Obama could easily win the next election -- but this one will be difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

Here are the last paragraphs of an essay by Joe Klein. I don't agree with all of it; I strongly disagree with some of it. But it speaks to what I've been thinking about this Election and this point in time as we turn from one America into another.

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TIME: Sarah Palin's Myth of America
Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2008
By JOE KLEIN

....Enter Reagan. His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street...at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy. They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is "one of us," speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.

So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1840388,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner