The most noted trend leading up to Tuesday’s US midterm elections, of course, has been the emergence of a new generation of conservative leaders — so-called “Tea Party” candidates who have overturned the old political order in states like Kentucky and Nevada and who vow to confront the aging establishments of both parties in Washington.
And yet, a less noticed undercurrent is pulling politics in the opposite direction, too. The latest polling suggests we may see the election of several venerable politicians to offices they held before, including some who haven’t governed since the days when “apple” and “blackberry” referred primarily to fruit. And this suggests that as much as we talk about closing the book on the last era of US politics, we may be having some trouble letting go.
The poster septuagenarian for this new crop of resurrected office seekers is Jerry Brown, who was the youngest governor in the country when Californians elected him to the first of two terms in 1974. (Brown was famous then for dating Linda Ronstadt. You can Google her, or just ask your mom.)
The Republican Terry Branstad, too, was the country’s youngest governor when he took office in Iowa, sporting a Burt Reynolds-era mustache, in 1983. He and his now-gray mustache appear poised to retake the office next week, which would give Branstad a fifth term as governor.
Two other Democratic governors who left office in 2003, John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Roy Barnes of Georgia, are vying for comebacks. Then there’s Dan Coats, the Indiana Republican who relinquished his Senate seat in 1999 and who now seems likely to take it back, despite having apparently retired for a time to North Carolina.
Such candidacies would seem to contradict one of the more sound truisms in politics, which is that campaigns are always more about the future than they are about the past. Think back to 2002, when Democrats, mourning the loss of Senator Paul Wellstone in a plane crash, tried to install Walter Mondale as a sentimental choice in his place. Minnesota’s voters felt badly about the tragedy — but not quite badly enough, it turned out, to revisit 1984.
So why the sudden success of political nostalgia? The most obvious explanation has to do with the economic morass. When a moment is as bad as this one, there is probably a tendency among voters to conflate past moments in the life of the country, on one hand, and the politicians who personified them, on the other. If by comparison, the 1980s seemed so much easier and more promising to Iowa voters, then why not just go hire the guy who ran the state then? Surely he’ll know what to do.
This probably explains the recent burst of former US president Bill Clinton envy, too, with both Democrats and Republicans expressing affection for the 42nd president and his administration. The anxiety over lost jobs and pensions in US President Barack Obama’s era fuels a fondness for the economic stability of the Clinton years, just as the military misadventures of former US president George W. Bush’s tenure led to a longing for his much-derided father.
But perhaps this trend hints at something deeper churning in the national psyche as well, having less to do with the president’s policies than with societal change he represents.
Obama’s election, after all, marked the leading edge of a generational transition. Unlike his predecessors, Obama is too young to have been forged by one of the last century’s great conflicts (either World War, Korea or Vietnam) or by one of its great liberal expansions of government (the New Deal or the Great Society). The president represents a US where racial and regional distinctions are often harder to discern than they used to be. In his penchant for sarcasm, he personifies the post-Simpsons US, where edge displaces earnestness.
Judging from polls, all this makes a lot of Americans, and especially older Americans, profoundly uncomfortable, and it may be the main reason — rather than simple racism, as some liberals contend — that Obama has fared worse among elderly voters than previous Democrats did.
We tend to think of generational changes as happening all at once, like a door suddenly blowing open. In reality, though, there are probably hesitations at the threshold, brief moments where much of the country, having glimpsed the future, seems inclined to stay exactly where it has been. And perhaps this is that kind of moment, which is why voters and parties in some cases gravitate toward the last era’s politicians, candidates who seem comfortingly knowable and familiar.
For Republicans, that impulse to relive the past could have serious implications for 2012, as they seek a compelling contrast to Obama. Consider what happened after the election of Clinton, the first boomer president. Similarly energized then as they are now, and eager to exploit the same kind of cultural friction, Republicans in 1996 nominated the former senator Bob Dole, who, at 73, was an icon of the World War II generation.
“Let me be a bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action,” Dole implored in his acceptance speech in San Diego that year.
Voters preferred Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century,” instead — and by a wide margin. Americans may stutter-step at the doorway to generational change, but in the end, we almost always barrel ahead.
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