Obama team reflects tolerant, pragmatic late boomer views

President-elect Barack Obama may well be one of the 79 million members of the baby boom generation. But he’s a late-wave boomer, a child of the 1970s – as are half of the two dozen people he has selected thus far to help him lead the country.

Many of those Obama is bringing to Washington – including his education secretary, homeland security chief, treasury secretary, United Nations ambassador and energy czar – came of age in the era of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. And their shared experiences offer insights into how they may govern: They tend to be less ideological than early boomers, more respectful of contrary opinions, more pragmatic and a lot less likely to get bogged down by the shibboleths of the 1960s, according to historians, marketers and pollsters.

Late boomers were doing wheelies on bikes and playing with dolls back when early boomers were fighting in Vietnam, avoiding the draft, singing along with the Mamas & the Papas, mourning a president, marching for civil rights and trekking to Woodstock.

The post-war baby boomers were those Americans born from 1946 to 1964. But Jonathan Pontell, a Los Angeles marketing and political consultant, says generational experience, and not birth rates, is what defines a generation. Several years ago, he labeled the late boomers, those born after 1954, as “Generation Jones.”

Members of Generation Jones, which includes the 50-year-old Pontell, were too young to really experience the tumult of the 1960s, though some of them were around to see it. “We were wide-eyed, not tie-dyed,” he said.

“I remember some older kids in my neighborhood offered to take me along to Woodstock. When I announced the good news to my parents at dinner, they said, ‘Finish your broccoli and go to bed. You’re not going to Woodstock. You’re 11 years old.’ ”

Pontell says he came up with the label Generation Jones because he regards later boomers as a lost, anonymous generation. Among those traits are a competitive drive (a need to keep up with the Joneses) and an intense, often-unrewarded yearning – in the argot of the 1970s, this generation always has a Jones for something more.

“This generation had big expectations, but it was confronted with a souring economy that left it with a certain unrequited Jonesing quality,” Pontell said

Generalizations about generations, of course, are fraught with exceptions for such things as income, race, family circumstances and geography. Still, people who sell consumer products and politicians make big bets on those broad-brush portraits. And if late boomers, 1 of every 4 adults in America, are moving in and starting to take over from early boomers, that’s bound to have some implications for the country.

One result could be an end to the early boomers’ obsession with the Vietnam War, according to Scott Rasmussen, a nonpartisan pollster and, at 52, a late boomer.

“There is a wedge group here, and it could be what allows us to start putting things like Vietnam behind us,” Rasmussen says. “If you came of age in the 1960s, you had to make a decision about Vietnam. But if you were a few years behind that, as I was, you weren’t faced with the same choices.”

During the election, Republicans attempted to cause trouble for Obama by highlighting his acquaintance with 1960s radical William Ayers. It foundered when an exasperated Obama noted that Ayers and the Weather Underground “engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old.”

Late boomers are neither reliably Democratic nor Republican; they were about evenly split between Obama and Sen. John McCain. And, some argue, both sides seem to share Obama’s pragmatic political outlook.

Julian Zelizer, a professor of public affairs and history at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, says the main difference between early and late boomers “is that people who came of age in the ’70s saw a country where conservatism could do well politically.”

In other words, they saw the power of Reagan.

As president of the Harvard Law Review, for example, Obama surprised his fellow law students by publishing papers from conservatives as well as liberals. And Obama’s oft-stated desire to work with his political opponents reflects the feeling of many late boomers that there is no single correct political ideology.

That may explain why so many members of Obama’s generation fall into the category of undecided voters. Rasmussen’s polls in the 2004 presidential election identified late boomer women as the least settled voting bloc.

Alan King, a 45-year-old Chicago lawyer and Obama confidant, says many in Obama’s circle of friends “grew up in a more diverse and tolerant environment, which I think in many respects helped shape all of our world view. And you can see that in the diversity of the team Barack is putting together to run the White House.”

When Pontell gives speeches to companies trying to sell products to Generation Jones, he likes to point out the personality traits of his generation. They’re “in play” and open to persuasion, he says. They really Jones for new lifestyles and new products. They also change careers and opt out of the rat race at much higher rates than older boomers.

But the trait he cites that might help Obama’s Washington team is what he calls “middle child syndrome.” When faced with angry political rhetoric, Jonesers tend to assume the role of mediators.

“That’s very Generation Jones,” he says, “and I think it will very much inform this generation of leadership. Many of us want to have our turn to be influential. And now it’s our turn.”