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If McCain doesn't win, it will mean that no one born in the 1930s will ever have been President.

Did that era not breed leaders?

I had been thinking that if Obama wins, it will mean that we are done with Baby Boomer Presidents, after having only 2 ? young Bush and male Clinton. I thought that was rather pathetic for this big, famous generation of mine. There would still be time to pick up another or 2, though. (I know: You're sick of us!)

But to think of the 30s as Presidentless. It's so strange.

AND: The commenters are in rebellion! They say Obama is a boomer. (He was born in 1961.) If he is, I blame the New York Times for this idea that is planted in my head that he has come to put an end the era of the boomers: "Shushing the Baby Boomers."

In taking the first steps toward a presidential candidacy last week, Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961 and considers himself a member of the post-boomer generation, said Americans hungered for ?a different kind of politics,? one that moved beyond the tired ideological battles of the 1960s....

Mr. Obama calculates that Americans of all ages are sick of the feuding boomers and ready to turn to the generation that came of age after Vietnam, after the campus culture wars between freaks and straights, and after young people had given up on what überboomer Hillary Rodham Clinton (who made her own announcement on the Web yesterday) called in a 1969 commencement address a search for ?a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.?...

?In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,? he writes, ?I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation ? a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago ? played out on the national stage.?

That Week in Review piece by John M. Broder got a lot of play on the blogs, and it made a big impression on me. Everyone has been talking about the generational shift. Especially Andrew Sullivan.

My fellow Boomers may like to think that the charismatic Senator Obama is one of us. But he's not checking the Baby Boomer box on the presidential application form. I know it's supposed to be all about us, as it always has been, as far as we're concerned. But at some point it's just not.

ALSO: Homodex checks out all the decades going back to George Washington's decade (the 1730s) and discovers that there is one ? but only one ? other decade before the 1930s that did not produce a President: the 1810s. He also noted that there are 3 decades that have produced 4 Presidents.

Full post as published by Althouse on April 27, 2008 (boomark / email).