For president, a generational conflict

The new century has opened with a pervasive sense of American decline, and for good reason. The history of the Bush years is anything but a tonic for the spirit: the nation deceived by official lies into endless Middle Eastern warfare, loss of America's good reputation around the world, erosion of the middle class, astounding budget deficits, growing financial dependence on China, that sinister power-grabbing operation in the vice president's office, torture.

And now the collapse of Wall Street, home office of triumphant world capitalism, its famous masters of the universe forced to endure the humiliation of asking for government handouts. Serious people who understand these things speak of the worst calamity since the Depression.

The two men competing for the unenviable job of trying to reverse this decline present a classic conflict of generations. Barack Obama is 47 years old; John McCain is 72, old enough to be Obama's father. This unusual age spread between presidential candidates brings to mind a wide variety of familiar literary plots about father-and-son conflicts. In classical mythology, the son must kill the father to allow for Earth's renewal; in the modern TV sitcom, the son must overcome the father's refusal to let him have the car on Saturday night; in soap opera, the father, decrepit and no longer roadworthy, must be made to surrender the car keys to the son; and so on.

Once, popular comedies of the "Father Knows Best" school allowed the old fellow a bit of dignity and occasional homey expressions of half-baked wisdom, but the prevailing rule was that youth must be served. Something along this line seems to lie behind the intense Obama campaign to register legions of young voters. It assumes that youth is on Obama's side, and, indeed, it is rare to hear a kind word for McCain from anyone under 30.

McCain may take comfort from statistics showing that young people don't vote in impressive numbers but that old folks do. Whether his age will fetch masses of the elderly to his side is by no means certain. Despite his 72 years, McCain has a giddy, impetuous quality more commonly associated with youth than Obama's pensive gravity.

Watching McCain is entertaining. He seems never to have gotten over being a bomber pilot and notorious bad boy of the Naval Academy. It was the giddy, impetuous bomber pilot McCain who gave America Sarah Palin as the best possible right-wing Republican to be the next vice president of the United States and thus -- to the delight of leading political wordsmiths -- galvanized, electrified and energized his party's famous "base," its indispensable army of Christian churchgoers.