Barack Obama was six years old when John McCain’s plane was shot down over North Vietnam. He was eight years old still six when the Summer of Love brought flowers to every unwashed head in San Francisco. By the time the Kent State shootings went down, he had turned nine–a big boy indeed. But even so, he is the first presidential candidate since the cultural tumult of the Vietnam War who never had to weigh in on Bob Dylan turning electric, or the bombing of Cambodia, or whether Tim Leary was on to something, or whether Muhammad Ali was a role model for refusing to serve.
Just don’t tell that to the McCain campaign. Its new ad tries bravely to tie Obama to all the cultural division of that era. It’s a contrast spot, which compares McCain’s military service to the hippy culture of the 1960s. Though Obama’s name is never mentioned–he was not yet old enough to shave, let alone protest–the ad clearly identifies the counter-culture with the Obama campaign. “It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change,” begins the narrator. Hope! Change! Beware! “Beautiful words cannot make our lives better. . . Don’t hope for a better life, vote for one.”
In some ways, this is a predictable theme. Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the 1960s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation’s hinterlands against the cultural elites, the liberals of New York and Los Angeles. But the effectiveness of the strategy is arguably aging. Does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?
If anything, the ad highlights the generational divide between the two candidates, which shows up in public polls that have McCain performing much better among the 50+ crowd, while Obama cleans up among the 18 to 29 demographic. Back during the primaries, McCain loved to joke about Hillary Clinton’s earmark for a Woodstock museum. As an attack, it sort of worked. Clinton, who is 14 years older than Obama, was very much a product of the 1960s and early 1970s. But Obama? I guess you could argue that his fancy Ivy League education was heavily informed by the period. But at the time of Woodstock and the acid tests, he was building sand castles and learning arithmetic. Can he really be tagged with the historical burden of longhairs and bell bottoms?
Incidentally, the ad is set to air in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and on national cable.
Correction: As noted above, I originally erred in identifying Obama’s age during the Summer of Love, which took place in 1967. Obama was born in 1961.