Well, now we know who Hillary Clinton will back if she doesn't get the Democratic nod

And it isn't Barack Obama:

First of all, what "lifetime of experience" does Hillary Clinton bring? Is she saying she really WAS a kind of co-president, despite having no security clearance? And if so, doesn't that play into every right-wing nightmare about her? Second of all, she has two years more in the Senate than Barack Obama has. What "lifetime of experience" does that represent?

You know, I'm a baby boomer. I'm a later one than the Clintons; I'm kind of a mid-boomer -- too young to have been an activist beyond stuffing envelopes for Democratic candidates after school and cutting class to go to marches. According to the "strict definition" of the baby boom, which went until 1964, so is Barack Obama. But I'm not interested in any more of those Chris in Paris At Americablog screeds about how evil the baby boomers are and how wonderful and virtuous everyone younger is and because they like Obama, they'll decide that the baby boom ended the year BEFORE he was born.

I work alongside a woman who is 38 years old. That's a pretty sizable difference, and a generational worldview one as well. There are things she does better than I do; there are things I do better than she does. And what we've found is that when we work together on designing a user interface, or the way a system should flow, it usually ends up being better than what either of us does on our own. I have more "experience" developing user interfaces, but much of that experience is based on PC-based, client-side Visual Basic applications. I have more "experience" with day-to-day Web site usage because of the ridiculous amount of time I spend online. That doesn't make me an expert on how, say, teenagers use the Web.

Experience isn't the same as longevity. There are people younger than I am who have the kind of experience I will never have. Kyle de Breusset, the young man from the MTV street team that I interviewed here a few weeks ago is better-travelled than I am, and has more "experience" in what people who try to get into this country by any means necessary go through. I'm going to discuss immigration with him, when my experience with Latin American immigrants is limited to the guys who replaced my roof ini 2004? Hardly.

To someone who's twenty, 1992 is so far back s/he probably doesn't even remember it. But I do remember what it was like to FINALLY have someone who didn't see the world through the prism of World War II in the White House. I'm not convinced that the Clintons were ever the kind of 1960's idealists they wanted us to believe they were -- and their membership in the DLC and the policies they enacted showed they weren't.

I've talked many times about the various kinds of people with whom I went to high school in order to demonstrate that "the baby boomers" are not the monolithic image that advertisers and Tom Brokaw use to sell us products and books. Sure, there were the idealists who wanted to change the world; but even they weren't monolithic. Some were the radical types who thought only violent revolution would create change, others thought that advocacy of peace and love was enough. And there were still others; the guys in their Izod shirts and plaid pants; the ones who canvassed for Democratic candidates who believed that you had to work within the system to change it. THOSE are the guys who grew up to become the Clintons.

It may be the curse of every generation to become its own parents. I remember the time, twenty-plus years ago already, when I was leafing through posters in a mall store with a friend. In those days, posters of heavy metal hair bands were in vogue. I heard the following words come out of my own mouth: "But they're all so UGLY!" I whipped around and said, "Who said that?" -- expecting to see either my mother or someone else's mother behind me. That moment horrifies me to this day. Of course the flip side of that is being a fifty-year-old going out to buy a copy of American Idiot, which I'm smart enough to realize doesn't make you cool, it makes you pathetic. But then, I didn't used to be the First Lady in an administration that was all about Putting the Sixties To Work for Change. So to hear Hillary Clinton behaving like as much a spoiled brat as George W. Bush, joining the You Goddamn Kids Get The Hell Off My Lawn caucus, tacitly endorsing a guy whose life's mission is to once and for all win the Vietnam War is particularly distressing.