Barack Obama is a social conservative.

yardwork

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Mon Jan-05-09 10:57 PM
Original message

Barack Obama is a social conservative.

Now that I've finally figured this out I actually feel better about things.

The clues were always there. Obama was born in 1961, the tail end of the Baby Boom. I know this age group well because I'm only a year younger than Obama. I learned in another thread here tonight that there's even a name for us - we're the "Jones Generation." As a group we tend to be more cautious, less optimistic, and generally more conservative than the older boomers.

Those of us born around 1960 did not share the free spirit optimism of the boomers who had been cavorting through the 1970s a few years before us. The chickens sort of came home to roost for us, and when my cohort was in college, a lot of us were more interested in getting high-paying jobs than having sit-ins. Reagan was elected when Obama was 19. Young Republicans were a major force on college campuses at that time, and young Democrats were few to be found. I know this because I was one. On my entire university campus exactly three of us showed up to start a chapter of Young Democrats. There were hundreds of Young Republicans - all clad in dock siders, Lily Pulitzer, and Izod Lacoste. (The memories still make me shudder.)

Obama's mom was 18 when he was born in 1961, and while he may have found his early years exhilerating, I imagine that they were also somewhat frightening at times. P.J. O'Roarke (a boomer who acts like a Generation Joneser) summed this up in one of his mildly amusing but idiotically conservative essays by noting something like (I'm paraphrasing) "People think that the 1960s were the time of peace and love. I remember it as the time of yelling at the dinner table." The point is that for many of us, the 1960s and 70s were a confusing, bewildering, troubling time when our older brothers and sisters (and even parents, in Obama's case) seemed to be causing a lot of trouble and making the grownups mad all the time.

For us later boomers, there were really only two ways to go. Either go with the majority - the Reagan Revolution that was sweeping the country - or hunker down and become an outcast leftie. I became a socialist in college. Like many others in our cohort, Obama became a pragmatist with traditional social views.

Obama is not planning to champion gay rights, women's rights, immigration rights, worker's rights, Palestinian rights, or anything else that makes suburban professional upper-middle class Americans mildly uncomfortable. Obama views the social upheavals of the 1960s with a faint distaste, which he has expressed from time to time during the campaign.

Obama is friendly with Rick Warren, Tim Kaine, and other social conservatives because he generally agrees with their social views.

Where Obama differs from the Republicans is in his economic and fiscal pragmatism. That is where he plans to make his significant policies as president.

Circumstances may require Obama to get more deeply involved in issues of social justice than he would like. But if he does, it will not be because he chose to do so.