The powerful attraction that the young have to Barack Obama has been much discussed, and lately, I’ve been trying to tease out some of the thinking that underlies the devotion to the junior senator from Illinois. In the past two weeks, I’ve met with a few students and some of my old youth group kids. In my office and at Starbucks, the conversation has invariably turned to politics; virtually to a man and woman, these young folks are Obama supporters.
I’ve been asking the same single question lately: “From your perspective, whose election — Clinton’s or Obama’s — would be more likely to send the message that anyone really can grow up to be president?”
My survey is not scientific. But virtually all of the young (and by young, I mean under 25) folks I’ve chatted with lately have answered “Obama”. It isn’t just the case that race trumps gender, even though more than half of the people I’ve chatted with are young women. It’s that to those too young to remember the first space shuttle explosion, Obama’s “narrative” seems more emblematic of American possibility than does Clinton’s. On Monday, I met with an eighteen year-old former youth-grouper of mine who just voted for Obama in the primary. This young white female said she had initially liked Ron Paul until she found out he was pro-life; a registered independent with liberal/libertarian leanings, she had become increasingly captivated by Barack. And though she might consider voting for McCain if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, she’s thoroughly in the Obama camp for now. And yes, without prompting, she made the same remark that everyone else seems to be making: “If Obama can be president, then anyone can be president.”
Honestly, these conversations have made me feel old. Perhaps I’m still very much in the mindsight of second-wave feminism, even though I’m too young to remember that movement at its zenith. For me, in the end, nothing could be more revolutionary than electing a woman to the most powerful office in the country (and presumably, on earth). Hillary Clinton’s life narrative may not be as inspiring as Barack Obama’s, but when I look at Hillary (twenty years my senior), I see a familiar sort of figure: a woman who has spent her life working twice as hard to get half the credit she would receive were she a man. And though my affection for her is not rooted in her sex alone, I’m struck — as so many older feminists are struck — by the willingness of the young to see gender as entirely irrelevant.
My mother told me, when I was very young, that someday we would see a woman president. Like many of my generation and hers, I’ve believed that the moment we elect a woman as “leader of the free world” (a wince-inducing phrase, but there it is), we will have at last crossed the Rubicon of progress. In a world where women have, for so very long, been denied their full humanity, no single marker of change could be greater than to choose someone with ovaries and put her in the White House.* The USA is not the UK, or Israel, or India, or Argentina (all countries which have had women as heads of government). To the degree that I still buy into the seductive notion of American exceptionalism, I believe that there would be something uniquely revolutionary about choosing a woman as commander in chief.
As a child of five, I accompanied my mother to rallies for the late Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972. As a young man of 20, I wrote my first-ever political check to Pat Schroeder, the Colorado congresswoman who explored a run for the Democratic nomination in 1988. I’ve been waiting a long time, and others have been waiting much longer.
The young, it seems, are so confident that a woman will “someday” be president that they feel no sense of urgency to help “someday” be now. Whether or not that’s prorgress, I really don’t know.
* This is a feeling, folks, not necessarily a fact.
