Today is Barack Obama's 47th birthday. He shares the same birthdate as Louis Armstrong, Helen Thomas, Billy Bob Thornton, Roger Clemens, and Percy Shelley.
Much has been made about Obama's youth, and I've joked about how much I love to hear that, being just nine days older than he is. In 1908, an American man could expect to live just 49.5 years. Had they lived a century ago, Barack Obama would likely have been nearing the end of his life and John McCain would've been dead for decades. It's only now, as average life expectancy nears 80, that Obama is considered to be barely middle aged. But as he closes in on the half-century mark, Obama has had plenty of time to gain wisdom and perspective.
Go below the flip to learn why someone born in 1961 is ideally suited to be president ...
Obama is arguably in the best possible cohort to lead our nation through these uncertain times. Demographers are undecided whether those of us born in 1961 are part of the Baby Boom generation or of Generation X, though most of us - including Obama - seem to identify more strongly with the latter. We are old enough to remember typewriters, but young enough to have embraced the first personal computers. (Anyone else a former TRASH-80 user out there?) We are old enough to remember when, as children, we had just three or four TV stations, but young enough to have been present at the creation of HBO, CNN, and MTV. We are old enough to remember the last energy crisis, when our parents waited in line to fill gas tanks, but young enough to know that our future lies not in oil but in alternative sources.
Here's the most important detail, though: Those of us born in 1961 are too young to have been personally gut-punched by the excesses and upheavals of that decade. We don't remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy; if we recall the 1968 shootings of his brother Bobby and of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., these memories are hazy. Unlike John McCain, whose whole life has been defined by war and by the military, Barack Obama and I and millions in our age group grew up and became adults in an age of possibility, progress, and (mostly) peace. My earliest and only real memory of the 1960s is not of war nor race riots, but of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon in July 1969, just days before Barack Obama and I both turned eight.
This election is a contest of fear versus the future. One candidate is stuck in the distant "duck-and-cover" past in which potential dangers are paramount in all political decisions. The other candidate chooses to focus more on how we engage with the world and with each other in an age of unparalleled connectivity. Although he acknowledges that danger and evil exist, Obama's presidency would not dwell on these factors, but on the possibilities of a safe and sustainable energy future, health care for all Americans, and opportunity for every American citizen. A vote for Obama is a vote for both the vitality of youth and the wisdom of well-established adulthood.