Ellen Goodman on Obama’s Age
Is there something just a little bit amusing about the Obama “inexperience” concern?
Ellen Goodman thinks so…
Somehow I do not think that Barack Obama gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, looks in the mirror and says, ‘Wow! A fresh face!’ It doesn’t happen at 45. At 45, you count the crow’s feet and measure the circles under your eyes.
If you are a woman, you start reading the fine print on the Oil of Olay Regenerist label. After, of course, putting on your new reading glasses. If you’re a man, you start swiping eye cream from your wife’s stash.
While you are inspecting your not-so-fresh face, you remember that when Mozart was your age he’d been dead 10 years. Albert Einstein published the big theory of relativity at 36. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33. It begins to occur to you that you will never be a prodigy or the youngest anything, not even the youngest president of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt had that sewed up at 42.
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Most of the green-talk is indeed from boomers, a generation that was just coming of age — teen-age — when Jack Kennedy was killed at 46. Is it possible that the same generation that famously didn’t trust anybody over 30 when they were 20 doesn’t trust anybody under 50 now that they are turning 60?
One of the charms of the boomers, the watermelon in the demographic python, is how they are managing to age without getting old. My favorite factoid comes from a Yankelovich study showing that boomers define “old age” as starting three years after the average American is dead. It’s a new wrinkle on the 1965 song by “The Who”: “I hope I die before I get old.”
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Obama was technically born at the tail end of the boom, but places himself politically outside the “psychodrama of the baby-boom generation,” which he describes in his book “The Audacity of Hope” as “a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”
The “new generation” of network anchors leading the green-talk — Brian, 47; Katie, 50; and Charles, 63 — are all older.
Well, it’s a shock when the people you went to high school with start ruling the world. It’s another rite of passage to acknowledge juniors as your superiors. But boomers are now turning 60 with a life expectancy of 82. It’s an early sign of memory loss to forget that at 45 you were wise or foolish, or both — but you weren’t young.
That master of the last word, Oscar Wilde, said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” He figured that out at 39.


