Republicans for Obama?

Barack Obama isn’t a conservative. He isn’t a traditional liberal either. He’s a political pragmatist and this is why younger people identify with him. There is a very real and a very aggressive campaign being waged, currently, under the radar of the major pundits that will become a major theme in 2008. It is the rise of the young/old voter – the young voter who isn’t that young anymore.

For years we have heard the statistics that the worst voting group in the nation is 18-24 year old demographic. There is no evidence that this will change in 2008. However, there is significance in the fact that the much-maligned 18-24 years olds in 2000 and 2004 are now approaching, or even have now surpassed, the adult milestone of turning 30. What these people represent is a new voting demographic – those who came into their political adulthood in the Clinton years, the grunge generation, those of us who grew up with a handful of flannel shirts and an earful of Pearl Jam now suddenly have a degree of quasi-maturity on account of our age and will likely vote en-masse for the first time.

The grunge generation, to blatantly generalize, is cynical and anti-ideological. Our parents, the boomers, were caught up in the rhetoric of the “change” generation and were consumed with a gluttony of self-righteousness and self-indulgent sense of purpose that failed miserably to change the world, instead leaving us with impractical politics and, unforgivably, with the Clintons. If anyone defines the lost cause of the Boomer mythology it is Bill and Hillary and their delusional self-aggrandizement. We are culturally beyond the Clintons – they are the past – there is a very real movement for a candidate that represents us.

We see through the Boomers - we saw through it then just as we saw through the ex-hippie hypocrisy of our parents. The decisions made in the 90’s and in this disastrously bloody decade, have been grotesque follies exposing the very need for pragmatism and caution in politics, instead of dangerous ideology. Though I cannot speak for my generation as a whole, it is safe to say that we feel as though we are another lost generation of men and women, viewing politics with the same cynicism we have developed out of contempt for “message based” politics, ad campaigns, and abuses of power in the form of wedge issues and in the name of domestic security. We have moved on into a new world of the post-ideological and we need a candidate.

Enter Barack Obama. Though he probably never jammed to Smells Like Teen Spirit, he has the right message for ears that have been waiting to hear it for a long time. He wants solutions and not just rhetoric and he’s about leadership and not just about straw polling and image. For young Republicans as well as young Democrats alike, he has the momentum as the first candidate from “our” generation, even though he isn’t actual a part of it. His message is and it is resonating with people who are tired of party politics. It is resonating, even with disenchanted Republicans.