The Age of Aquarius has finally dawned in Presidential politics. Sort of.
With the first baby-boomer ticket, Bill Clinton and Al Gore hope to capture the White House by projecting youth, energy and empathy for the values and issues that matter to their generation.
"The revenge of the baby boomers," George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton's communications director, calls the new fortysomething team.
Michael McCurry, a Clinton campaign adviser, dubs it, "Bill and Al's Excellent Adventure."
The Republicans' riposte that the Democrats are just a matched pair of blow-dried policy wonks who, as the Bush spokeswoman, Torie Clarke, sniffs, "have been bellying up to the Twinkie bar too much."
James Pinkerton, a Bush campaign official, said, "You get the feeling that you'd invite them over to watch a baseball game and they'd want to switch the channel to C-Span."
Patrick H. Caddell, the Democratic consultant who has long preached the potential in finding candidates who could mine the votes of those born in the baby boom from the end of World War II to the mid-1960's, said: "This wasn't quite what was in mind. It looks like the chess club took over."
Indeed, the first story about Mr. Gore's selection on the NBC News program "Today" showed a sound bite from a speech that underscored the notion that the ticket might be short on passion and long on policy prescriptions. Mr. Gore said that the nation must learn to "deal with knowledge, especially in its digital form."
Also, if the many disaffected baby boomers and young people drawn to the Perot challenge are fed up with insiders and pols of all stripes, Governor Clinton of Arkansas and Senator Gore may have a hard time camouflaging themselves as true outsiders.
Mr. Clinton has been massaging the Washington Establishment for years, as though the capital were an Arkansas precinct. And Mr. Gore, now the junior Senator from Tennessee, was the son of another Senator from Tennessee and grew up at a fancy hotel in Washington, sometimes ordering room service from the expensive restaurant downstairs called the Jockey Club when his parents were away. It was "Albert at the Fairfax," a Washington version of the children's books about 6-year-old Eloise at the Plaza.
Despite the Clinton campaign's initial fusillade of youthful, vigorous imagery -- shots of the Democratic partners jogging and pictures of a covey of healthy blond children -- the Clinton camp knows that generational politics are tricky.
