Dole’s View of Baby Boomers Generates Heat, Not Light

Bob Dole can declare war on my generation if he wants, but why?

Mr. Dole, we don’t hate you. We think you’re a little out of touch, but we aren’t laughing at you. We aren’t minimizing the struggles you’ve been through.

What’s your beef with us?

Newsweek magazine headlined its post-GOP convention story “Bring On the Baby Boomers” and suggested that part of the Dole strategy will be to chide the generation President Clinton represents.

I’m rereading Dole’s acceptance speech and picking up some bad vibes. I’m hearing some bitterness. I also sense that the former senator doesn’t understand my generation’s view of his generation.

In describing elements “within the Clinton White House,” Dole referred to a “corps of the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned . . . “

That has an ugly reverberation to it. It’s one thing for Dole to say their policies stink, but he obviously wanted to go beyond that. He sounds like someone who has something stuck in his craw, and it sounds like it goes beyond a bunch of White House operatives. It sounds to me like he wants to trash an entire generation.

All too often, Dole comes across as the stereotype of the old man sitting on the porch, saying, “Back in my day . . . “

When I’m 73, I’ll probably do the same thing. In fact, I do it now when watching whippersnappers in their 20s and early 30s going about their business. But I’m not presidential timber, so I can get away with sweeping irrelevancies about the generation coming up behind me, realizing in my saner moments that I’m merely parroting what every generation has said about the one following it.

I’d like to think a president would know better than that.

Dole is either very mean or very foolish. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t mean that, to toughen us up, we all should have fought in a war or survived a depression. He couldn’t mean that, could he?

I’ll assume he’s referring to life’s other sacrifices and sufferings. If so, that makes me think he’s merely foolish. If he thinks people in their 30s and 40s haven’t sacrificed and suffered in various ways, he’s been locked in the Senate too long.

What, exactly, is it that Mr. Dole wants from us? What sacrifices does he mean? What suffering? What didn’t we learn?

Yes, we avoided a depression and a world war, but I would think he’d want to celebrate that fact. Dole almost sounds resentful that our generation didn’t have a depression. I’m sure he resents those who protested the Vietnam War, but is avoiding a war his definition of having never sacrificed, never suffered?

Has he heard about alcoholism? Child abuse? Family tragedies? Does Dole know the life story of every White House staffer to whom he was referring? The president himself, whom Dole no doubt includes in his diatribe, was an infant when his father died and then had an alcoholic stepfather. That doesn’t sound like any bed of roses.

You could make the argument that few generations were as star-crossed as the one born during the 1920s. Their childhoods were dominated by the Depression and they were teens when World War II broke out. Dole was born the same year as my father and three years before my mother, and I’ve spent much time thinking about how difficult their childhoods were.

What I read into his insinuation about the Clinton White House is a profound misunderstanding that the baby boomer generation doesn’t appreciate what his went through. I think we understand it very well, especially as we’ve aged and acquired a better historical context.

Dole, on the other hand, seems trapped in his 1960s time warp when millions of teenagers were rebelling against the Vietnam War and, by extension, their parents. Those days are long gone, Mr. Dole.

We made peace a long time ago and have bought into the long view of things.

Why does Dole want to do generational battle? Is it because he’s made little effort to understand the generation trailing him? I’d venture to say that Bill Clinton is much more familiar with the history and social culture of Bob Dole’s generation than Bob Dole is with Bill Clinton’s.

Does anyone have the sense Dole understands the baby boomers?

Has he forgotten that millions of them voted for Ronald Reagan?

Maybe it makes Dole feel better to think that everyone born in the 1940s and 1950s has had a cushy berth in life.

That’s part of the problem with him. Just about the time you start liking the guy, he shows you that Darth Vader side and it makes you wonder how he’d hold up as president.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.