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Like my close contemporaries Barack and Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris, I’m a late bloomer Boomer. Born toward the end of the baby boom generation which ran from 1947 through 1964 —and now, in the eyes of the supercilious millennials who make up the so-called progressive wing of my Democratic Party— teetering on the brink of antiquity, I find myself realizing that my frame of reference, my weltanschauung, if you will, is more similar to that of Joe Biden, the Obamas, and even that of Kamala Harris then it is to, say, my personal trainer, who was born in the 1990s.
Like Barack, Michelle, and Kamala, together with many other late bloomer boomers, I was experiencing of the not unmixed joys, if one may use such a word, of late adolescence and early adulthood when the digital revolution snuck up on us and mugged us. Those of us who were adolescents or young adults during those years in the late 1970s when the first personal computers had their advent, had spent our youth in a world very much like that of Joe Biden. When we wanted to send a message in writing, we either put pen to paper, we pecked it out on a typewriter --electric if we were lucky enough to have one, manual for most of us. We did our shopping either at brick-and-mortar stores or from the pages of a paper catalog which arrived at our domiciles courtesy of the United States Postal Service. When we wanted to listen to music on demand, we spun platters of vinyl on turntables, or, as the quondam Vice President might put it, on a record player. In my early adulthood, CDs were in their infancy and streaming audio was the stuff of science fiction, along with Captain Picard’s replicated tea, “Earl Grey, hot.”
The computers and devices on which all of us, even Boomers, depend, have largely changed our Boomer world. Unfortunately, the convenience afforded by our various devices has merely papered over a ravening gap between the generations. Indeed, Politico’s Ryan Lizza, writing the day before yesterday in Politico, observed that
To Biden’s advisers and allies, the gap between a press corps, as well as the wider online political class, that is largely in its twenties and thirties and a candidate who would be 78 at his Inaugural explains a lot about why the pundits and Twitter activists are so confounded by the former vice president’s resilience.
Moreover,
“The [press corps covering the Biden campaign] view this party as dominated by woke millennials and through the lens of coastal issues. They are products, increasingly, of fairly elite schools and they don’t talk to a lot of voters who don’t look and talk like them except their parents, who also tend to be similar to them. Occasionally they are shocked to learn they have relatives who voted for Donald Trump. And they were not on the ground in the Midwest primaries for governor races in 2018 in Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin where more moderate and older and more experienced candidates won against young cool left — often people of color — primary opponents.”
The same objection has also been voiced by acerbic political commentator Bill Maher, who from his relative antiquity of 63, has made it fairly clear that he has little patience for the so-called woke left.
And if the Biden camp has felt a certain not unjustifiable disdain for the woke, millennial left, certain parts of that woke left have made no secret of their active loathing for Joe Biden and the moderate majority of the Democratic Party. For example, writing in Truthout not too long ago, woke left activist William Rivers Pitt (born in 1971) turned the quondam Vice President’s debate remark about record players into a racist screed apparently equal, in Pitt’s mind, to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Indeed, the largely Generation-X and millennial commentariat, smugly convinced of their own superiority to all those fusty old boomers and pre-boomers, and secure in their conviction of their own wokeness, has managed to do fairly well in creating a “but his gaffes” narrative of Joe Biden as a “fragile front runner,” and a doddering, superannuated, gaffe prone old man whose candidacy will inevitably collapse of its own age, its own inconsistencies, or its own un-wokeness.
Yet, what all the woke hipsters of Generation-X and the millennial cohort seem not to remember is a rather time-honored truth in politics, as much as in anything else, that youth, skill, and enthusiasm will be defeated by age and treachery. Much of the woke contingent, which, paradoxically enough, seems to profess a curious fondness and loyalty toward Bernard Sanders, the oldest candidate in the primary, seems to overlook the fact that the 40-plus voters who make up the majority of the Biden base are not looking for a candidate who will usher in enormous, transformative change in American society in the next four years. Rather, the 40-plus voters of the Biden base, having learned from bitter experience not to upset the apple cart, are looking for a candidate right now who can, in the words of one commentator of Boomer years, right the ship and get us out of the storm in which the antics of Donald Trump have placed us.
We don’t need, quite frankly, to be lectured by contingent of brats who have not yet acquired the wisdom or the understanding to realize that, as Bill Clinton, a Boomer of 73 now, noted, during his own 1992 primary campaign, that when selecting a standard-bearer, “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.” Older Democrats, accustomed to having had their asses kicked with the stolen election of 2000, the stolen election of 2004, and midterms and local elections around the country, have begun to feel a hell of a lot less need to “fall in love” with a candidate of absolutely unimpeachable purity on every conceivable issue. Democrats who have begun to see silver threads among the gold or the ebony have learned that sometimes the Rolling Stones were right, "you can't always get what you wanted, but you might find sometimes that you get what you need" if you're willing to hold your nose, swallow hard, and fall in line.
And while we’re still alive, we'll take the pragmatic option. We’ll opt for the candidate who doesn’t necessarily come trailing clouds of transformative, purist, glory. We’ll opt for the candidate with a history of experience; we’ll opt for the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief; will opt for the old guy who’s been around and yet who doesn’t insist on waving his finger in our face and shouting at us all the time, as that tiresome fellow Bernie Sanders is wont to do; while we are still alive, we who are teetering on the brink of an age range will opt for Joe Biden.
What we Boomer Democrats want, we Boomer Democrats who are teetering on the brink of old farthood, is for the Democratic Party to get its act together. We want the Democratic Party to recover what it had in 2008 and 2012, the will to victory. We're tired of being told our mettle is bred out, that we are to out of touch, that we are too "socialist," and that we don't have the temperament for the fight. Let's remember the words of the Sean Connery character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue."
We must be rude, partisan, unfair and hectoring to the Republicans, but we must have a truce within our own fortress.
And be damned to the woke left and their pretensions.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. At 392 (in coyote years), he is teetering on the brink of an age range, though AARP has been trying to recruit him since he was a mere stripling of 290.he makes no claim, and advances no pretension, to being particularly woke, just to being an old line yellow dog/coyote Democrat. Call him neoliberal, a corporate shill, or Republican-lite, and expect him to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is ready to hand. The views expressed herein are his own.
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