Politics Prepares For The X Factor The 18-30 Crowd On The Verge Of Being A Political Force

When recent graduates streamed back to Penn State University’s homecoming this month to watch football, renew friendships and share fledgling impressions of the adult world, the talk inevitably touched on politics.

But interestingly, for the most part they didn’t argue Clinton-vs.-Dole. Instead, the young alumni spoke of the entire political process and what - if anything - it means to them.

“I don’t think about politics a whole lot anymore,” said John Wicinas, 25, a graduate who returned to Penn State to work on his second master’s.

“It’s hard to have an intelligent conversation with someone our age about politics,” he said. “The world’s too big - that’s why I gave it up. I used to be more interested, but it’s impossible today to really be completely informed.”

This is, generationally, perhaps the most unusual election of the century. Two distinct groups - the World War II generation, personified by Bob Dole, and the baby boomers, exemplified by President Clinton - are squaring off and invoking as mantras values associated with the times they came of age.

But on the electoral sidelines is a formidable bloc of voters, a group too young to field a candidate but strong enough to influence the outcome: men and women ages 18-30.

Members of this group are, some say, a “watcher generation” in this year’s campaign, trying to define their expectations after coming of age in a media-saturated culture drastically different from anything that came before.

“Much more than in 1992, there is a transition here between generations: Who’s going to provide national political leadership?” says J. Walker Smith, co-author of “The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing: Reaching America’s Three Consumer Generations.”

“Clinton is developing his campaign, consciously or not, around the values that boomers have in the ‘90s,” Smith says. “Dole is the GI generation - the ones who made it through the depression and made sacrifices….And then there is Generation X - a truly unique beast.”

Consider these traits of the 18-30 demographic: Many never knew a childhood without divorce; none knew an adulthood without AIDS. For some, Richard Nixon’s resignation is their earliest political memory.

“These are people who are starving for some honesty in politics,” says Tabitha Soren, the 29-year-old MTV reporter who made her name covering the 1992 presidential race from her generation’s perspective.

The irony

While Dole’s generation had World War II and Clinton’s Vietnam, today’s young adults have drugs, terrorism and street violence. Battlefield and homefront have become one. The struggles are less distinct.

“You don’t have one youth rallying issue anymore,” says Dave Sirulnick, senior vice president for news at MTV, which has helped mold the 18-30 generation and tried to interest it in politics with a drive called “Choose or Lose.”

Politically, many between 18 and 30 - the so-called “Generation X” - consider themselves skeptical of the process, unwilling to vote a straight ticket and resentful of the boomer-generated conspicuous consumption that pervaded the 1980s.

“Boomers think life is a morality play - the charge of good vs. evil,” Smith says. “Xers have grown up with a very different sense of that. And when Xers look at boomer presidential candidates, they are going to see many of the things they have disliked about boomers all along.”

Polls conducted this year by MTV have shown half of young adults consider themselves middle of the road, while 24 percent feel they’re conservative and 19 percent identify themselves as liberals.

They also showed young people overwhelmingly supported strong environmental protection laws, a balanced budget and a higher minimum wage. A majority also supported abortion rights and content regulation of the Internet and television.

Another poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center last month, with a 4 percent margin of error, showed that 57 percent of people under 30 preferred Clinton, compared with 52 percent of people 18-49, 46 percent of people 50-64 and 53 percent of people over 65.

Taken together, that data seems to suggest that while young people may favor Clinton, they’re not necessarily favoring him for the same reasons. In short, the generation cannot be explained away by a shared ideology.

“Generation X has a deep sense of irony about things,” says Dan Thomas, a political scientist at Iowa’s Wartburg College who teaches a class on the generation and its characteristics.

“They’re suspicious,” he says. “People that pretend to be saviors or faultless are immediately suspect. One thing about Bill Clinton: You can say he’s a slick operator and a politician in the derogatory sense, but he’s clearly not fault-free. And young people are OK with that.”

Calling the campaign a contest of generations is oversimplifying matters, but the theme does resonate. Dole was born in 1923 and fought and was injured in World War II. Clinton was born in 1946, the dawn of the baby boom, came of age in the tumultuous 1960s and did not fight in Vietnam.

Their messages - and their styles - reflect these differences.

Passing the torch

Thirty-six years ago, it was John F. Kennedy - born six years before Dole, a fellow World War II vet who said, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”

Over the next eight years, as the torch again begins to pass, younger Americans will be moving toward fielding their own candidate and taking their place in the hierarchy.

They’ll have no direct experiences of the Depression, World War II or the optimism that pervaded the nation in the years that followed. They’ll have grown up in the shadow of the boomers and learned from their excesses.

What kind of candidate will spring from this landscape?

Some safe bets: It’ll be someone who grew up on computers and knows not just how to use them but how to exploit them. It’ll be someone just as at home with R.E.M. and “ER” and TCP/IP as with diplomacy, budget-balancing and social policy. Someone not consumed by idealism - whether it be for the past or the future.

“We need someone who is a good communicator. Personable. Someone who at least seems honest - someone you can believe in,” says Sharon Entenberg, 21, a Penn State senior and president of the school’s student government.

“We’re lacking in a model that we can look up to,” she says. “I hope we find one soon.”