New Geography

Tag: Obama’s America

  • Don’t Touch That Dial!

    If this were the 1950s, a buzz would be going through the African American community right about now because, come Tuesday, another small milestone would be reached in our progression from involuntary to voluntary servitude. The milestone? A black man is going to appear on television.

    Sightings of black people on the tube back then were rare. Hence, there was always some excitement when it occurred. You had Beulah and Amos and Andy on regularly – singer Hazel Scott once had her own show as did singer Billy Daniels. Nat King Cole had a very popular show for a while but lack of national sponsorship and the fact that they didn’t give him any money to pay his guests forced him to fold it. But you’ll notice these people were all entertainers. Real black people, those who couldn’t sing, dance, play an instrument or tell jokes, were never seen on television.

    Just as importantly, they were never seen in TV commercials. It seemed at the time we had a surfeit of bumbling white husbands and clueless white wives. But somehow sponsors were reluctant to associate their products with similarly deficient blacks.

    Blacks were also seldom seen in television dramas. Whole towns, let alone neighborhoods, were portrayed as devoid of dark-skinned residents. No one had a black friend in those towns. Workmen, sure. Servants, yes. But not friends.

    Simply put, black people were systematically and summarily excluded from the popular culture. And not just from television. It was radio too, where small skirmishes were fought over whose version of “I’m Walkin’” was to be played: Ricky Nelson’s or Fats Domino’s. Naturally, Ricky usually won. It was also true in movies where Super Sidney and Calypso Harry were our only stars. And even they better watch their step lest they offend with too strident a tone or too familiar a manner. And, of course, the newspapers simply did not cover the black community at all unless to report crime statistics.

    To black children of the time, it meant that except for the people in their immediate geographical area, other blacks did not exist. They could turn on the television and enter a world where they saw no one who looked like them. No one they could look up to; no black role models save the Kingfish.

    This situation gradually changed over time. As we moved into the Sixties, the days of “Civil Rights,” blacks emerged out of their real and virtual ghettos. The panoply of blacks expanded to include new types: protesters, militants and eventually, that curious group known as “tokens.” Those were black people used to dress a set like a table or lamp. Nothing was really expected of them but to stand there and be seen – to prove someone knew about them. The “token” was always a “good” black person, meant to represent and asked to speak for all black people. They were not angry like militant H. “Rap” Brown, or civil rights protesters like that troublesome Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Their pop culture numbers ranged from one-twelfth of the Dirty Dozen to a full 30% of the Mod Squad. These were fully-integrated, completely-assimilated, likeable, sympathetic blacks you could work with and invite to your home for dinner. What more could black people want?

    As it turned out, quite a bit more. Black people wanted to be part of things they had helped create. They wanted to be included in a country where inclusion was guaranteed by the Constitution. And, later, as the Eighties dawned in America, they also wanted to be on MTV.

    The pathways to those goals generally excluded politics. Politicians could never be counted on to improve our lot. It became a kind of game to parse the words of the white candidates to see how much they were on our side. There was always just enough there to get the black vote but not enough to turn away the still racially-averse white vote. And after they were elected, all the courtship promises were forgotten. After all, shouldn’t our Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall be enough? Shouldn’t our UN Ambassador Ralph Bunche suffice for a while? Didn’t Adam Clayton Powell prove you couldn’t trust these people with real political power – and power over white people?

    So the preferred pathway lay elsewhere. Sports and entertainment became the ticket. The pop culture route was most efficient because entry couldn’t be denied. A 400-hitter or hundred-yard rusher was a crowd pleaser, white or black, and therefore an economic winner too. Singers, composers and musicians could set a toe tapping before the race of the performer was noticed. Albums of music could be distributed with no photos of the artists to offend the racially biased.

    In time, the economics of black consumerism was enough to move product – considerable product. By the Seventies, the purveyors of what became known as “blaxploitation” movies figured out that filling a movie cast with black faces might lead to filling movie theaters with black faces. And, once it was realized that blacks bought the same products and services that whites did, even television commercials began to feature one or two in the same inane scripts that once were reserved for whites. Later, new generations of whites weren’t as choosy about who made the music they liked. Thus the MTV barrier was broken. What more could black people want?

    And now, politics has been put back on the front burner. The playing field has changed. Not completely, of course. Regardless of what you hear, we are still far from being a post-racial society, not for another couple of generations, at least.

    But now there is a widening array of black images out there. There is something at last for young black people to shoot for and be proud of. There is another way to go besides being running back or gangsta rapper. There is being part of the making of the future – and not only for ourselves. There is being included in the calculation. There is greater belief in the sincerity of the politician. There is more balance in the popular culture.

    Is that the “more” that blacks wanted? Not really. The truth is blacks never wanted “more” in the first place. All we really wanted was the same.

    So when Tuesday rolls around, that buzz will still permeate the black community. Old, young, and in-between we will all gather around our LCDs, some of us wistful, some of us hopeful, to celebrate our past and watch history being made – as a black man appears on television.

    Bob Carr is a free-lance writer, editor and webmaster living in Los Angeles. He has been an Associate Editor and Senior Staff Writer for Playboy magazine and was born in Charleston, South Carolina shortly after VJ Day.

  • Not Even Gerrymandering Will Save Some Candidates from Ethnic Shifts

    California’s 32nd congressional district, stretching from East Los Angeles to the eastern San Gabriel Valley, would seem like friendly territory for a Hispanic candidate. Labor Secretary-designate Hilda Solis’s district is more than 60 percent Latino, and there is no shortage of Hispanic local and state lawmakers eager to replace her in Congress.

    But rapidly shifting demographics suggest an Asian-American candidate – State Board of Equalization Chairwoman Judy Chu – has a shot at winning the urban-suburban district. Asians make up nearly 20 percent of the district, whom statistics suggest are better-organized politically, wealthier and have generally attained a higher level of citizenship (voting power) than Latino residents.

    The 32nd is one of several congressional districts that could soon trigger new leadership in ways that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. The city where Chu long served as mayor, Monterey Park, is one of the only majority Asian-American municipalities in the nation.

    The increasingly mobile nature of American society means that no district – no matter how carefully gerrymandered – can be considered permanently safe. So while Solis’s district could slip away, Latinos can look west down the I-10 freeway to a swath of potential pick-up opportunities among seats held by African-American lawmakers.

    Consider the South Los Angeles-based 35th Congressional District, long represented by firebrand liberal Maxine Waters. The area won national attention – and infamy – as the epicenter of L.A.’s two postwar riots: in Watts in 1965 and at the corner of Florence and Normandie in 1992.

    But the district is no longer majority black. Inglewood – once all white, later mostly black – is now about 46 percent Hispanic, though city statistics suggest African Americans still vote in higher numbers. Hawthorne now has more Hispanics than blacks. And South Los Angeles, an almost entirely black neighborhood at the time of the Watts riots, now is home to more Hispanics. A small shift in district boundaries in the post-2010 Census redistricting process could provide a Hispanic lawmaker a decent shot at beating Waters in a Democratic primary.

    Rep. Diane Watson faces a similar political predicament in the neighboring 33rd District. Watson was a pioneering African-American lawmaker in her long state Senate career before serving as ambassador to Micronesia in the Clinton administration. She won a 2001 special election to Congress in the demographically diverse district, which begins about one mile inland from Venice Beach, runs through Culver City and ends up in South Los Angeles. The district also includes Koreatown, the Miracle Mile district, and Hollywood – all areas with both an influx of immigrants from various countries and a growing cadre of young professionals.

    Though once solidly African-American, the district is now 35 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black and 12 percent Asian. Lower citizenship rates among Latinos have deflated their political clout. But small shifts in new redistricting could have a considerable impact on Watson, altering the district’s racial and ethnic balance of power and possibly generating serious primary competition from a Latino challenger.

    This drama was already played out in the Long Beach area 37th Congressional District during a 2007 special election. The seat takes in Compton and Carson, which went from predominately black through the 1980s to heavily Latino. When Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald passed away in early 2007 the open seat special election quickly came down to another African-American Assemblywoman – Laura Richardson – and Hispanic state senator Jenny Oropeza. Richardson edged out Oropeza in the special election primary, a temporary setback for Hispanic political ambitions. But the district could change considerably in redistricting within two years, providing another Hispanic pickup opportunity.

    The story is similar in other demographically shifting districts around the nation. In 2008 once-Republican Virginia, Democrats took over three U.S. House seats. The suburban district of long-time Republican Rep. Tom Davis fell to Democrat Gerry Connolly in an area filled with professional transplants from across the Potomac in Washington, D.C. Though technically part of the South, Northern Virginia votes more like affluent parts of New Jersey.

    Michigan, Pennsylvania and other large states with relatively static populations are projected to lose seats in the post-2010 redistricting process. Meanwhile rapidly growing Sunbelt states like Arizona, Florida and Texas will make big gains. All these states are seeing rapid demographic shifts, particularly from Latinos.

    Members of Congress have grown expert in tailoring district lines to their own political advantage. But given the rapidly shifting demography of the nation, the redistricting process of 2011 could result in even the craftiest lawmakers and political consultants losing control of their electorate.

    David Mark is a senior editor at Politico.com and author of Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning.

  • Does Growing Inequality Mean the End of Upward Mobility?

    Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency won’t end racism, but it does mean race is no longer the dominant issue in American politics. Instead, over the coming decades, class will likely constitute the major dividing line in our society—and the greatest threat to America’s historic aspirations. This is a fundamental shift from the last century. Writing in the early 1900s, W.E.B. DuBois observed, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Developments in the ensuing years bore out this assertion. Indeed, before the 1960s, the decade of Barack Obama’s birth, even the most talented people of color faced often insurmountable barriers to reaching their full potential. Today in a multiracial America, the path to success has opened up to an extent unimaginable in DuBois’s time.

    Obama’s ascent reflects in particular the rise of the black bourgeoisie from tokens to a force at the heart of the meritocracy. Since the late 1960s, the proportion of African-American households living in poverty has shrunk from 70 percent to 46 percent, while the black middle class has grown from 27 percent to 37 percent. Perhaps more remarkable, the percentage who are considered prosperous—earning more than $107,000 a year in 2007 dollars—expanded from 3 percent to 17 percent.

    Yet as racial equity has improved, class disparities between rich and poor, between the ultra-affluent and the middle class, have widened. This gap transcends race. African-Americans and Latinos may tend, on average, to be poorer than whites or Asians, but stagnant or even diminishing incomes affect all ethnic groups. (Most housecleaners are white, for instance—and the same goes for other low-wage professions.) Divisions may not be as visible as during the Gilded Age.

    As Irving Kristol once noted, “Who doesn’t wear blue jeans these days?” You can walk into a film studio or software firm and have trouble distinguishing upper management from midlevel employees.

    But from the 1940s to the 1970s, the American middle class enjoyed steadily increasing incomes that stayed on a par with those in the upper classes. Since then, wages for most workers have lagged behind. As a result, the relatively small number of Americans with incomes seven times or more above the poverty level have achieved almost all the recent gains in wealth. Most disturbingly, the rate of upward mobility has stagnated overall, which means it is no easier for the poor to move up today than it was in the 1970s.

    This disparity is strikingly evident in income data compiled by Citigroup, which shows that the top 1 percent of U.S. households now account for as much of the nation’s total wealth—7 percent—as they did in 1913, when monopolistic business practices were the order of the day. Their net worth is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s households combined. The top 20 percent of taxpayers realized nearly three quarters of all income gains from 1979 to 2000.

    Even getting a college degree no longer guarantees upward mobility. The implicit American contract has always been that with education and hard work, anyone can get ahead. But since 2000, young people with college educations—except those who go to elite colleges and graduate schools—have seen their wages decline. The deepening recession will make this worse. According to a 2008 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, half of all companies plan to cut the number of new graduates they hire this year, compared with last. But the problem goes well beyond the current crisis. For one thing, the growing number of graduates has flooded the job market at a time when many financially pressed boomers are postponing retirement. And college-educated workers today face unprecedented competition from skilled labor in other countries, particularly in the developing world.

    The greatest challenge for Obama will be to change this trajectory for Americans under 30, who supported him by two to one. The promise that “anyone” can reach the highest levels of society is the basis of both our historic optimism and the stability of our political system. Yet even before the recession, growing inequality was undermining Americans’ optimism about the future. In a 2006 Zogby poll, for example, nearly two thirds of adults did not think life would be better for their children. However inspirational the story of his ascent, Barack Obama will be judged largely by whether he can rebuild a ladder of upward mobility for the rest of America, too.

    This article also appears at Newsweek.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • President Obama, Bring Us Together

    The election of Barack Obama signaled the beginning of a “civic” realignment, produced by the political emergence of America’s most recent civic generation, Millennials (born 1982-2003). Civic generations, like the Millennials, react against the efforts of divided idealist generations, like the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) to advance their own moral causes. Civic generations instead are unified and focused on reenergizing social, political, and governmental institutions and using those institutions to confront and solve pressing national issues left unattended and unresolved during the previous idealist era. The goal of a transition during such realignments has to be to lessen the ideological splits that have divided America during the preceding idealist era and take steps to unify the country so that the new Administration can more effectively deal with the major issues it faces.

    Reducing ideological divisions and unifying Americans to achieve important common goals has been a focus of Barack Obama since even before he announced his presidency. It is one of the key reasons his campaign had strong appeal to the emerging civic Millennial Generation, which he carried by a margin of more than 2:1. When CBS’s Steve Croft asked the then-candidate in a pre-election interview what qualified him, a junior senator with limited governmental experience, to be president of the United States, Obama led off his reply by citing his desire and ability to bridge differences and bring people together.

    Through Your Actions
    One way a civic era president-elect can demonstrate the importance he places on the need for national unity is to name members of the opposition party to his cabinet. The actions of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only two other Presidents to preside over transitions to civic eras, demonstrate how this game should be played.

    For all the media commentary on Lincoln’s first cabinet, deemed a “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, it should be noted that it contained no one from the discredited Democratic Party, even though it did have representatives that spanned the breadth of opinion within the relatively new GOP. However, Lincoln did add a Democrat, Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, to his cabinet less than a year after taking office. Stanton, a strongly pro-Union Northern Democrat, had opposed Lincoln’s election and had served as Attorney General in the final months of the Buchanan administration. However, Lincoln’s selection of pro-Union Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his vice-presidential running mate in his 1864 re-election campaign demonstrates that it’s sometimes possible to take even a good idea too far. FDR appointed two Republicans to his initial cabinet–industrialist William H. Woodin, who as Treasury Secretary helped FDR implement his economic and fiscal program at the outset of the New Deal, and Harold L. Ickes, who served as Interior Secretary throughout the entirety of the Roosevelt administration. Both Woodin and Ickes were progressives who had supported FDR in the 1932 election. While neither was a member of the Republican Old Guard, together they demonstrated Roosevelt’s willingness to reach beyond his own party to enlist what today would be called “moderate Republicans” in a unified effort to overcome major national problems.

    Reflecting America’s changing demographics and social mores, Barack Obama has chosen the most diverse cabinet and set of top advisors of any president in U.S. history. Two members of Obama’s larger number of appointees — Robert Gates and Ray Lahood — are not Democrats, the same number for which FDR found room. This represents a greater number of members of the a different or opposing party than were present in the Cabinets of any of Obama’s idealist era predecessors.

    President-elect Obama’s attempt to include a wide range of political opinion and backgrounds in his Cabinet and White House team has generated criticism from the most ideological members of his party, just as FDR and Lincoln faced such criticism from the extreme partisans of their day. Obama’s appointment of many “centrist” cabinet-level officers who previously served in Congress, the Clinton Administration, or as governors suggests to his critics that he is abandoning his pledge to bring about significant change in economic, foreign, and social policy. But as political scientist Ross Baker points out, “In uncertain times, Americans find it much more comforting that the people who are going to be advising the president are steeped in experience. A Cabinet of outsiders would have been very disquieting.” And civic realignments like the present one have come at the most uncertain and stressful times in America’s history.

    Through Your Words
    Lincoln and FDR are also renowned for their ability to use their words to rally Americans to a common cause. Both did so at the very outset of their terms. Both of these great civic presidents’ first inaugural addresses addressed the fears of a nation in crisis with rhetoric that has continued to ring through the ages.

    Lincoln, in another last-ditch effort to forestall secession, told the South that neither he nor the Republican Party would make any attempt to undo slavery in states where it already existed. But he also reminded the South that, while only its actions could ultimately provoke civil war, his “solemn oath to preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution would require him to prosecute that war if it came.

    Lincoln concluded his address with an appeal to the secessionists to rejoin the Union:

    We are not enemies, but friends…Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

    Roosevelt used his inaugural speech to rally the country to the task ahead by telling it, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He reminded his listeners that at previous dark moments in our national history vigorous leadership joined with a supportive public to win ultimate victory in the nation’s trials. Perhaps most important, FDR gave clear recognition that the United States and its people had moved from what we have called an “idealist” era of unrestrained individualism to a “civic” era of unity and common purpose:

    If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.

    Even before President-elect Obama had a chance to utter similarly comforting and inspiring rhetoric, his inaugural plans came under fire for inviting Pastor Rick Warren, a fundamentalist minister and activist in the passage of California’s Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage, to give the invocation at his inauguration. But the selection of Warren should not have been surprising to careful observers. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama signaled his desire to find common ground on divisive social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and gun control.

    By bookending his inaugural with a benediction from Joseph Lowrey, a minister who favors legalizing gay marriage among other liberal causes, Obama has signaled his determination to put an end to the debates over social issues from an idealist era that is ending and enlist all those willing to join his cause to rebuild America’s civic institutions.

    For in the end, it is the American people that Barack Obama must rally to his side. It is they who will ultimately decide the effectiveness of his transition as a springboard to a civic era Administration. So far their judgment is overwhelmingly positive. A late December 2008 CNN national survey describes “a love affair between Barack Obama and the American people.” That survey indicated that more than eight in 10 Americans (82%) approved of the way Obama was handling his transition, a figure that was up by three percentage points since the beginning of the month. Obama’s approval is well above that of either Bill Clinton (67%) or George W. Bush (65%) at that point in their transitions.

    More specifically, the poll suggests that the public approves of Obama’s Cabinet nominees, with 56 percent saying his appointments have been outstanding or above average. That number is 18 percentage points higher than that given to Bush’s appointments and 26 points above that of Clinton’s nominees. To quote CNN polling director Keating Holland: “Barack Obama is having a better honeymoon with the American public than any incoming president in the past three decades. He’s putting up better numbers, usually by double digits, than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or either George Bush on every item traditionally measured in transition polls.”

    Of course, the final judgment of the Obama presidency by the American people and history will be based on his performance in office starting on January 20. Still, these polling results clearly suggest that Barack Obama has internalized and put into operation the historical transition lessons provided by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the presidents who led America’s two previous civic realignments. If his inaugural address comes close to matching their first inaugural speeches, President-elect Obama will begin one of the most important administrations in the nation’s history with an enormous reservoir of political and public support that will serve him well in the crucial early days of his Administration.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008).

  • How Detroit Lost the Millennials, and Maybe the Rest of Us, Too

    The current debate over whether to save our domestic auto industry has revealed some starkly different views about the future of manufacturing in America among economists, elected officials, and corporate executives. There are many disagreements about solutions to the Big Three’s current financial difficulties, but the more fundamental debate lies in whether the industry should be bent to the will of the government’s environmental priorities or if it should serve only the needs of the companies’ customers and their shareholders.

    But there’s something more at stake: the long-term credibility of Detroit among the rising generation of Millennials. These young people, after all, are the future consumers for the auto industry and winning them – or at least a significant portion of them – over is critical to the industry’s long-term prospects in the marketplace and in the halls of Congress.

    The enormous investments the federal government has been making in private enterprises, including the auto industry, will test the ability of private sector executives to meet the expectations of this very civically minded generation. Sadly, so far, it’s a test many business leaders seem likely to fail.

    In the case of the American auto industry, this failure has deep roots. Over the past few decades the leaders of the Big Three repeatedly have failed to move their industry in new directions, even when the opportunity to do so has plainly been put before them.

    Attempts to nudge Detroit into producing more fuel-efficient vehicles have been going on since the 1973-4 Arab Oil embargo, which led Congress to establish Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) standards for cars and light trucks. The target was for cars to meet an average of 27.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 1985. On Earth Day, 1992, Bill Clinton proposed to raise that standard even further to 45 mpg after he was elected President.

    When Al Gore was asked to join the ticket, auto industry executives, terrified at the prospect that the man who had called for the abolition of the internal combustion engine might become Vice President, implored the leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to meet with the candidates and bring them to their senses. The lobbying effort worked. Under pressure from Owen Beiber, then UAW president, and Steve Yokich, who was his designated successor, and the powerful Democratic Congressman from Dearborn, Michigan, John Dingell, Clinton agreed to delay the adoption of higher CAFÉ standards until it could be proven that such goals were attainable.

    This formulation opened the door for what came to be known as the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles or PNGV. Reluctantly supported by the Big Three, PNGV provided approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in government research funds to demonstrate the feasibility of producing a midsize sedan that could get 80 mpg. Often called “the moon shot of the 90s,” each car company was to make a prototype of such a vehicle by the politically convenient year of 2000 and begin mass production by 2004, another presidential election year.

    After a few years of technological research, reviewed by the independent National Research Council (NRC), the partnership settled on the combination of a hybrid gasoline and electric powered propulsion system as the most promising approach. But by 1997, the car companies were resisting development of even a prototype for such a vehicle.

    Vice President Gore, who had been in charge of the PNGV program since its inception, decided to meet with the Big Three CEOs to make sure they did not forget their past commitments. The answer from Detroit was emphatic: profits were coming from SUVs and heavy-duty trucks, not cars. Gore suggested they deploy a 60 mpg hybrid passenger sedan in 2002 rather than waiting for an 80 mpg version in 2004. Ford’s Peter Pestillo and his UAW ally, Steve Yokich, quickly replied, “no way.” Pestillo maintained, “we need much more time than that to make them cost competitive.” Gore could have, but didn’t, embarrass his host by pointing out that Toyota’s Prius was already delivering 55 mpg.

    Not all executives were blind to the challenge. General Motors’ Vice-Chairman, Harry Pearce had been the driving force behind GM’s ill-fated EV1 electric car experiment. Despite a bout with leukemia that took him out of consideration for CEO of the company, he and his allies within GM exerted powerful influence on the company’s CEO, Jack Smith. He also won over an influential ally at Ford, the Chairman of its Board of Directors, William Clay “Bill” Ford, Jr., great grandson of the company’s founder.

    At the Detroit Auto Show in January, 1999 Bill Ford personally introduced a new line of electric cars, under the brand name, THINK. Even though Honda and GM had abandoned the concept of an all electric vehicle by then, Ford said he thought there was still a niche market for such a car. Tellingly, Jac Nasser, Ford’s newly installed CEO, demonstrated his attitude toward these ideas by treating the visiting Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, to a personal trip in a new Jaguar Roadster with the highest horsepower and worst gasoline mileage of any car at the show.

    Right after that display of internal differences at Ford, Harry Pearce personally presided over the public introduction of General Motors’ PNGV hybrid prototype car, which delivered 80 mpg fuel efficiency, while seating a family of five comfortably. He then surprised everyone by revealing GM’s real vision of the future – a hydrogen fuel cell powered car called the “Precept” that got 108 mpg in its initial EPA tests. He grandly predicted that such cars would be on the road by 2010.

    Clearly the industry was at a critical fork in the road. At a 2000 meeting at the Detroit airport, almost exactly one year to the day since their last meeting, Vice President Gore suggested to auto company executives that developing these products could enhance both the industry’s image and each company’s individual brands. Gore reminded his listeners, “It’s not just the substance of the issue you need to consider. You also need to think about the symbolism of the decision. Putting SUVs into the PNGV project would change the public’s perception of where you are going in the future.”

    Jac Nasser wanted to know if such a commitment would change the dialogue between the industry and government. Gore suggested he would put his personal reputation behind such an agreement, which would garner the auto industry a great deal of positive press and appeal to the growing ranks of environmentally minded consumers.

    But when it came time to put their reputation on the line, the auto executives blinked. The CEOs were not ready to commit to any specific production goals. This less-than-clarion call for a green automotive industry future made it only to page B4 of the Wall Street Journal the next day and was otherwise ignored by the rest of the public that the participants were hoping to impress.

    Today, only Ford, the one American auto company not to ask for a bailout in 2008, is ready to offer a car that meets the original Clinton target. In showrooms in 2009, its Fusion Hybrid five-passenger sedan uses the hybrid technologies first explored in the PNGV to get 45 mpg in city driving, more on the highway, and costs about $30,000. As a result, Ford is in a much better position today to weather the whirlwind of change in consumer tastes and financial markets, even without the support of the federal government.

    Unfortunately for America, General Motors, the largest of the Big Three, went in almost the opposite direction. Rick Wagoner, who became General Motors’ CEO in June 2000, chose to pursue an SUV-centered strategy that won big profits for a brief period. Since then, however, GM stock has plunged 95%, from $60 per share to roughly $3 in late 2008. General Motors, which lost $70 billion since 2005, has seen its market share cut in half. Having failed to embrace a public partnership with a sympathetic government, Wagoner was forced to beg for a federal bailout with onerous conditions. Seven years after the fateful auto summit with Al Gore, when asked what decision he most regretted, Wagoner told Motor Trend magazine, “ending the EV1 electric car program and not putting the right resources into PNGV. It didn’t affect profitability but it did affect image.” [emphasis added]

    Had the auto industry taken Gore’s lead a decade ago and built a positive image among the very environmentally conscious Millennial Generation, it might have built a constituency to support the government’s bailout. Instead, the companies’ brands, particularly GM’s, have taken such a beating that the President-elect recently reminded the car companies that “the American people’s patience is wearing thin.” In contrast to young Baby Boomers buying songs by the Beach Boys celebrating the Motor City’s products, the country seems ready to drive their “Chevy to the levee” and tell the company “the levee is dry.”

    But that is not the right answer. Millennials bring not only an acute environmental consciousness to the country’s political debate, but a desire for pragmatic solutions to the nation’s problems that promote economic equality and opportunity. To secure Millenials’ support, however, the domestic automobile industry needs to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment. Not only would such an approach assure the industry’s future profitability, it would also remake its image in a way that will appeal to both their future customers and the politicians they support.

    Morley Winograd, co-author with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), served as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore where he witnessed the events described in this article. He and Mike Hais are also fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

  • “Milk” Puts New Attention on San Francisco’s Castro District

    The Castro District of San Francisco has found itself thrust into the national spotlight by recent events. With the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” across the country and the continuing controversy over Proposition 8, the neighborhood so instrumental in the gay rights movement is receiving a new surge of attention – and more importantly respect – for its rich history. Yet the Castro is not a museum district; it is a living, breathing neighborhood that is changing and facing significant challenges in a down economy.

    Clearly the area has not lost its huge symbolic political role. The brouhaha over the passage of Proposition 8 – which barred gay marriage in California – sparked marches and protests. To many it appears that the battle that began with Harvey Milk all those years ago has just entered a new phase that many Castro residents are anxious to continue.

    Situated in the heart of the city, just east of Twin Peaks – a large golden hill which beats back the fog from the neighborhood – the Castro is beloved for its colorful Victorians, vintage European streetcars, and eclectic shops and restaurants. It is the site of Harvey Milk’s famous camera shop. The triumphs (and recent setbacks) of the gay rights movement are on display at the large LGBT Center at Octavia and Market streets and in a new small exhibition, “Passionate Struggle,” that was just opened by the GLBT Historical Society at 18th and Castro streets (in one of its last acts, the space for the exhibition was donated by Washington Mutual for a year).

    The neighborhood has been changing in recent years – shopkeepers report a surge in strollers in the neighborhood. Professional couples and their children who may not be able to land a place in Noe Valley over the hill (aka “Stroller Valley”) have slowly been moving into the “gayborhood” (as it is affectionately called). Tour buses have been stopping at the busy intersection of 18th and Castro streets where tourists have been known to get out and, not always out of respectful curiosity, snap photos of two men holding hands to show their aunt in Peoria.

    Local merchants are hoping that all this recent attention can translate to the bottom line (I challenge someone to find an area of a large American city with more neighborhood and merchant groups than the Castro). Though known for technology, tourism is one of the largest industries in San Francisco and business has been lackluster of late. A huge vacancy where Tower Records used to sit at Market and Noe streets still lies empty after nearly two years. The building used to house a large Finnish baths when the area was populated by so many Norwegians, Swedes and Finns it was known as “Little Scandinavia.” One retailer, All American Boy, recently closed its doors after 32 years, and Suri – one of my favorite restaurants – will close for good on December 6th.

    Although the neighborhood has successfully positioned itself as the historical home of the LGBT community, many wonder if that legacy will be continued by a younger generation of gays who came out in a more tolerant era. They may take for granted what was fought and even died for by Harvey Milk and many others.

    Talk to longtime Castro residents and you hear concern in their voices that the neighborhood has lost its knack for experimentation and zaniness. The nearby Mission and South of Market districts now appear more triumphant in terms of “edginess” – a quality that is so important to San Franciscans’ identity. A friend of mine surprised me when he told me that he much preferred the gay culture in his home city of Atlanta over the Castro. The bars, he explained, were “more happening” than those here.

    Today many younger gays often prefer to venture to the city’s uberhip South of Market district where the bars and clubs are larger. Many complain about the narrow and sometimes dirty sidewalks as well as the lack of a large public space in the neighborhood.

    Of course, the neighborhood does not always feel as modern in its look as the glass towers South of Market. But still the Castro continues to be a busy area with numerous cultural events, including the neighborhood’s greatest resource, the peerlessly beautiful Castro Theatre which showcases so many great festivals throughout the year. With numerous events, parties and festivals year-round, the Castro has retained much of its original flair and taste for experimentation even as gay culture and the economy have changed. “Milk,” and Sean Penn’s amazing performance, do not only testify to this historical iconoclasm but speak of its staying power.

    Andy Sywak is the publisher of the Castro Courier neighborhood newspaper.

  • Can Millennials Turn around the Housing Bust?

    Many of the nation’s youth (and a few of their elders) are expecting a magical turnaround of America’s economic fortunes as soon as their candidate for President, Barack Obama, is sworn in on January 20th 2009. But the Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2003, may be more the source of the country’s economic salvation as any initiative the new President might propose.

    Millennials are the largest generation in American history, more than 91 million strong. They are coming of age just in time to join the workforce, enter the housing market, stabilize home prices, and buy the nation’s expanding inventory of durable goods to furnish their new homes. Despite being burdened with student loan debt and graduating just when the job market is shrinking, this group of optimistic, civic-minded young Americans is ready to demonstrate that it is not only capable of electing a President, but also helping to resolve the country’s housing crisis.

    The “helicopter parents” of Millennials constantly hovered over their children as they grew up in order to protect them from anything that might harm their self-esteem. As a result, many older Americans, especially the 27 to 43 year old members of Generation X, think the Millennials’ “can do” attitude will crumble once they are confronted by the “realities of the real world.”

    But this ignores the cyclical nature of generational change. The GI Generation – the Millennial civic generation’s great-grandparents who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s – were raised in much the same way and acquired many of the same values cherished by Millennials. These members of what have come to be called “the Greatest Generation” were able to draw upon a deep reservoir of confidence and determination to lead America’s recovery from the Depression and later win the struggle against both fascism and communism.

    To give Millennials the same opportunity to rescue America, the new Obama administration should give the emerging generation the same attention in its policy initiatives that it expended getting their votes. Certainly the opportunity is there, particularly in rescuing the now devastated housing market.

    One unintended collateral benefit of the rapid drop in housing prices across the nation is to put many suburban homes within reach of first time home buyers, something that has not occurred for at least a decade. Even in pricey California, for example, the ratio between income and cost of housing has begun to drop dramatically, notes a recent paper by Chapman University graduate students Gil Yabes and Jason Goforth, with the ratio between income and mortgages dropping by one half or more in Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, close to pre-bubble levels.

    That’s a big opportunity, one that President-elect Obama’s “Home Ownership Initiative” should seize on. The Millennials could well be the demographic that could buy these more affordable homes and staunch the rise of foreclosures threatening the U.S. economy.

    It’s not that these young people don’t want to own homes. A 2004 study of students enrolled in a four-year university, a community college and an historically black college found that about the same 40-percent plurality in each group preferred to live in a “suburban community, single family home,” upon graduation. The second choice of these Millennials was to live in a “rural area, with large lots and open space.” Only about a quarter wanted to live in an “urban setting with mixed housing styles.” Luckily for them, five years later, their preferred housing stock has just become imminently more affordable.

    Now the Democratic Congress and President Obama should enact a significant tax credit incentive for first time homebuyers, many of whom would be Millennials. By rapidly expanding the universe of potential homebuyers, this program would help stabilize housing prices in the critical lower cost housing market. At the same time it would help stem foreclosures among existing homebuyers, whose loss of home equity has made abandoning mortgages more rational economically than keeping up payments.

    In 1934, during an earlier time of far greater economic pain, the Federal Housing Agency (FHA) was created to provide financing for a new type of mortgage requiring a lower down payment with the loan to be paid off over 25 or 30 years. The federal agency’s financing authority was greatly extended through Title II of the Housing Act of 1949, which provided federally guaranteed mortgage insurance and helped a flood of returning GIs own a home. Now it is time for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be given the authority to finance a new mortgage structure for homebuyers under thirty.

    By lowering down payment requirements for this select group of home buyers to 10% and stretching the terms of mortgages to the number of years these young people are likely to be active in the workforce, forty, monthly payments on starter homes could be brought in line with the Millennials‘ ability to pay. Initially, this combination of tax credits and new types of mortgage financing would slow the decline in home prices that triggered the problems in the country’s financial markets. In the longer run, it will make sure that the benefits of widespread homeownership will expand to a new generation of Americans.

    One young Millennial to whom we talked recently was concerned that the hours her retail employer wanted her to work were being cut as holiday shopping continued to sour. She expressed concern that there was still “more than a month before Obama gets sworn in and everything turns around again.”

    Her statement exhibits the kind of economic naiveté that frustrates some older Americans, but does provide an important lesson – political as well as economic – for the incoming administration. The Millennial Generation, whose votes were key in nominating and then resoundingly electing President Obama, want to see things improve rapidly. After all, they lack either the experience or the equity that Baby Boomers have acquired over the years.

    Once in office, President Obama should embrace the impatience of America’s youth as one way to insure that his economic policies are enacted quickly. By making an explicit appeal to America’s largest generation’s desire for homeownership, he would not only take a big step toward ensuring the popularity of his economic program, but its effectiveness as well.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the New York Times 10 favorite books of 2008.

  • The Housing Bubble and the Boomer Generation

    Much of the commentary on the current economic crisis has focused on symptoms. Sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps and the loosening of financial regulations are not the root cause of the financial crisis. They are symptoms of what has recently become a surprisingly widespread belief that individuals, families and even entire nations could live indefinitely beyond their means.

    The crisis has reminded everyone that, in the end, market fundamentals like supply and demand still matter and that ignoring traditional virtues like thrift and long-term planning can lead to grief. But what does this have to do with boomers?

    Ultimately, this economic crisis shines some light on some of the most important yet unresolved and paradoxical aspects of American culture as it developed in the wake of the economic, social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

    Children coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s were born into families that, on average, enjoyed the greatest material prosperity and the best housing the world had ever known. The security offered by an enormously expanded and comfortable middle class allowed these children to crusade on behalf of various causes. Those who called themselves “progressive” pushed to expand individual civil rights, sometimes at the expense of what others perceived as community rights or duties, but at the same time they were often deeply suspicious of capitalism and markets and for this reason pushed to restrict the rights of private property owners in order to expand on their own notions of community rights.

    The result was, on the one hand, a massive effort to empower racial and ethnic minorities, women, gay people and many others. This aspect of the revolutions of the 1960s era has always been highly controversial, with conservatives fighting the “reforms” every step of the way. On the other hand, starting about 1970, there was an explosion in regulations on the use of land including tighter zoning and building codes, regulations governing environmental matters, historic preservation and land conservation, growth and building caps and growth management schemes. It became harder to build at the urban edge because of the environmental rules and efforts to limit “sprawl.” It also became harder to build at the center because of substantial down-zoning and other regulations to “preserve neighborhood character,” particularly in affluent neighborhoods. This aspect of the 1960s progressive agenda has led to grumbling about NIMBYism but has otherwise generated surprisingly little negative commentary.

    Nevertheless, this movement has created one of the most paradoxical legacies of the 1960s as programs justified in the language and logic of “rights,” have turned into bulwarks for the status quo and a mechanism to transfer wealth from younger families of modest income to more affluent older families.

    In the 1950s and 1960s developers in America built a huge amount of housing, primarily on cheap land at the suburban edge of almost every city in the country. This housing was remarkably inexpensive and, together with liberal financing terms, allowed millions of Americans to enter into the ranks of home ownership and the middle class. It provided the underpinnings for the enormous wealth of the boomer generation.

    Starting in the 1970s, though, particularly in some of the most desirable markets in the country, the same people who most benefited from the developments of the early postwar years turned against those development practices. They advocated regulations for many things that most people, then as now, would agree were desirable – conserving scenic areas and wetlands, protecting coastlines and animal habitats and preserving open space, historic buildings and neighborhood character.

    Yet the net effect of all of these regulations was to limit severely the supply of land for urban uses. Even more important, existing homeowners, what I have elsewhere called the “Incumbents’ Club,” created a political system that allowed them to dictate how much growth and what kind of growth would be permitted in their cities.

    This shift of decision-making about development from private developers and individual property owners to public planning bodies, almost always controlled by homeowners, was hailed by many observers as a triumph of democratic process. The community rather than the developers, so this line of thinking went, would henceforth dictate the growth of the community. The problem with this equation was that it failed to consider who was speaking for the community and whose voices were not heard or to calculate the costs and benefits of these policies.

    For existing homeowners in affluent communities like Boulder Colorado, or Nantucket Island or San Francisco, this regulatory rush turned existing land ownership into pure gold. By limiting the supply of land for development and driving up the costs of development where the land was available, it pushed up the perceived value of all houses, including their own.

    Take the case of the Bay Area, where land prices were on par with urban areas elsewhere in the country up until 1970. Then, as the area pioneered in land use regulations of every kind, house prices started a steep climb. Where the rule of thumb had long been that the average American family in any given urban market would expect to pay about three times its annual salary for an average house, by the early years of the 21st century it had reached the point where that average house in the Bay Area would be the equivalent of ten, eleven or even twelve years of the average family’s income. At the same time, however, in lightly regulated urban areas, even extremely dynamic ones like those of Atlanta, Houston or Phoenix, house prices registered no comparable rise against incomes.

    Nor was this all. There was at the same time an increasing movement around the country to push the cost of what had been considered public goods, like new roads, street lights, sidewalks and sewers, even parks and schools, onto the developers who then passed these costs on to the eventual buyers. As a result, existing owners who enjoyed infrastructure paid for by previous generations no longer had to pay for the infrastructure of their children’s and grandchildren’s generation.

    Finally, this elaborate edifice of protection of the interests of existing landowners was capped by a series of tax revolts starting in the 1970s, particularly Proposition 13 in California. This made it possible for members of the incumbent’s club to enjoy the benefits of rapidly escalating house prices without paying a corresponding share of the property taxes that financed most municipal services.

    These land use regulations and real estate tax policies have made possible, at least in certain highly regulated markets, one of the greatest transfers of wealth in American history. The primary beneficiaries have been existing landowners including a very large percentage of affluent boomers. The ones who have paid have been less affluent renters, younger people and all future generations of prospective homeowners.

    The existing homeowner in the Bay Area could watch the value of his house soar from a few hundred thousand dollars up into the millions without lifting a finger. Meanwhile the dramatic rise in land prices, because it has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in salaries, has devastated the prospects of young couples, many of whom were forced to either leave the area or obliged to take on huge mortgage debt just to afford an entry level house. These same people are now bearing the brunt of the steep decline in housing prices and the wave of foreclosures washing over the country.

    One of the most remarkable things about this enormous transfer of wealth has been how little most people were aware that it was happening or what caused it. A few people – notably Bernard J. Frieden in his book The Environmental Hustle from 1979 – had sounded the alarm. More recently Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavletich at Demographia.com have made a similar case using substantial data from cities in the English speaking world. Although all of these observers have been dismissed as free market enthusiasts, more mainstream commentators – like Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania – have embraced this theme. Even the noted liberal economist Paul Krugman has joined the chorus, comparing the moderate land prices in the “flatlands,” meaning lightly regulated places like Texas, with the extremely high prices in the “zoned zone” or places like heavily regulated coastal California.

    This leads us to the great challenge we face now keeping families in their homes. The sad truth is that in areas where housing prices have vastly outstripped incomes there may no easy way to do this. In many markets either housing prices will need to fall quite a bit further or income will have to rise substantially, and there is little likelihood – particularly with this weak economy – of the latter happening any time in the near future.

    One good thing that might come out of the current crisis, though, is a recognition that regulations, however well-intentioned, can come at a price, sometimes a high one, for some parts of society. I doubt very much that the boomer generation ever intended to create the current housing bubble or enrich itself at the expense of less affluent families and generations to come. This was the unanticipated consequence of a genuine desire to create a better life for everyone by individuals who, probably inevitably, defined the good life as the kind of life they themselves wanted. In many ways they succeeded all too well. We can only hope this downturn will at least open up a new chapter in the discussion of the bittersweet story of a generation that set out to remake the world.

    Robert Bruegmann is a professor of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book, Sprawl: A Compact History, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005, has generated a great deal of discussion worldwide.

  • Young Voters Turn America Left

    Nothing made Barack Obama’s victory potentially more historically significant than his overwhelming support from millennial voters, members of the generation born in or after 1982. Obama won voters under 30 by roughly two-to-one, compared with barely half for John Kerry, making some Democrats positively giddy with the prospect of long-term domination of American politics. Most of these voters also stayed with the Democrats down ticket, enhancing the mass slaughter of GOP lambs across the country.

    Whether the Democrats keep this edge, however, depends not so much on the new president’s personal appeal, but on whether he and his party can deliver economically for workers entering a very tough economy. This will become increasingly critical as millennial voters age and begin focusing less on symbolism and more on how the new regime has worked for them in terms of income and upward mobility.

    The poor economy impacts young voters more than commonly believed. Even before the recession kicked in, a 2006 survey by the Center for American Progress found 15- to 25-year-olds twice as likely to view the economy as the main issue than the rest of population. When they came out to vote earlier this month, young voters had little reason to support continued Republican rule. Even in the expansionary period earlier in this decade, the incomes of younger workers continued to fall, in part because they were too young to enjoy gains from either the stock or housing bubbles.

    More ominously, since 2000, these reverses have been shared even by those with college educations–the very group that, outside of the poor and African-Americans, most supported Obama. They voted for him at a time when, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, half of all companies planned to cut the number of new graduates hired from the previous year.

    In contrast to previous generations, millennials are finding that a four-year degree no longer insulates them from declining earnings or the specter of under-employment. This may be in part because college-educated workers today face unprecedented competition from skilled labor in other countries, particularly in the developing world.

    Reversing this trend for younger workers may well prove the greatest challenge and opportunity for the new administration. If the millennials stick with President Obama and the Democrats, we indeed could witness a long-term shift toward the left in American politics.

    Certainly, the initial indications are positive. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out in their groundbreaking book Millennial Makeover, younger voters were attracted to the egalitarian and “civic” orientation of the Obama campaign. They first rejected the individualist, combative baby-boomer ethos represented by Hillary Clinton, who did very poorly among younger voters. Later they also turned against the harsh tone of the McCain campaign and its embrace of both Cold War rhetoric and social conservatism.

    However, how long will the millennials’ leftward tilt last? It all depends on whether the new administration fixes the economy and creates opportunities for the millennials who will be flooding the workforce in the coming years.

    A generation’s early exposure to politics and politicians can shape their perspective for decades. The politics of the generation that came to age during the 1930s, for example, reflected their experience first with the New Deal and then with Democratic leadership during the Second World War.

    Although conservative ideologues can argue incessantly that Franklin Roosevelt’s policies prolonged the Great Depression, the fact remains that most Americans supported Roosevelt through the entire period. More importantly, after the great stimulus of the Second World War, large parts of an entire generation shared in one of the greatest periods of prosperity in global history.

    Not only did they enjoy a steady increase in real incomes, but also the average person’s access to homeownership and college education expanded at an unprecedented rate. In addition, critically, the economy’s expansion took place without increasing the gap between the rich and everyone else, unlike the most recent expansions.

    Economists can bicker all they want, but most people believed that the New Deal and the Democrats delivered. This won them the loyalty of a generation that kept them as the majority party well into the 1960s.

    If President Obama and the Democrats can deliver similarly prolonged economic growth with a strong egalitarian distribution, the millennials would seem destined to constitute the bulwark of a quasi-permanent new majority. Nothing that the Republicans could do with cultural issues or security could offset this phenomenon. Indeed, millennial positions on issues such as gay marriage and abortion suggest that contemplating a continuation of the “culture wars” could be self-defeating.

    This is not the only possible scenario. In the 1960s and 1970s, many baby boomers also embraced liberal politics, largely for cultural reasons and in opposition to the Vietnam War. However, the dismal economic failures of the Carter years, and the apparent cluelessness of the Democratic Congress in finding ways to compete in a changing world economy, ultimately drove many boomers to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. This shift allowed the GOP to dominate American politics for a quarter century.

    For the new president, the critical millennial challenge will be to create a vibrant, productive economy that can expand opportunities for new workers, including those with college degrees. Style and symbolism will seduce young people only for so long; ultimately, they will also want jobs, income and the chance to live a decent middle-class life.

    Everything depends on what the Democrats now do. Few of the forces closest to the new president–the gentry liberals, the legal establishment, the green lobby and big city mayors–have a track record of creating widespread new employment and expanding opportunity.

    In addition, much of the leadership of the congressional party, based in urban and elite locales, favors positions that might constrain broad-based growth.

    A policy of raising taxes on entrepreneurs (as opposed to the accumulated wealth of the gentry class), increased regulation on small businesses and spending on an ever-expanding public sector bureaucracy does not bode well for a strong economic resurgence.

    It is true that younger voters, as a recent Center for American Progress report suggested, support higher taxes and expanded government as the preferred way to solve social ills. But as they age, some of those very millennials will be the ones paying the bills for their good intentions. They will have to try establishing businesses in a harsh regulatory climate. This could turn even some now fervent Obamaphiles into retro-Reaganites.

    However, if the new president proves as clever at policy as at politics, and sparks a new growth economy, all this could prove moot. With a grateful new generation behind him, Obama could help the Democrats achieve a period of predominance every bit as extended as the one shaped by Franklin Roosevelt three-quarters of a century ago.

    It all boils down to whether the senator can meet the millennial challenge not only this year but also in the years ahead.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Obama: Making History but Not Ending It

    Barack Obama won a mandate among younger voters so large that it literally defies comparison, and with it, we’re told, a mandate to retire tired old fights of little concern to this new generation. Yet in the long run, it may well be that his victory has only put on hold some enduring political conflicts and may even ignite new ones.

    Obama’s 34-point, 66-32 percent win among the group that made up about 20 percent of voters and 60 percent of new voters was nearly four times the margin of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Clinton in 1992.

    This differential has been put down to the vast age gap between the first post-boomer candidate and his pre-boomer foe. A poll comparing support in an Obama-McCain race against a theoretical Clinton-McCain race in September, though, showed no gender gap in support for the respective Democrats, but a vast difference in the age of their supporters, with the Illinois senator faring 20 percentage points better than his New York counterpart among voters 35 and under, which was more or less cancelled out by Clinton’s 6-point lead among the larger pool of voters 35 and older.

    It’s clear that Obama’s victory represents, among other things, a generational transfer of power. What’s less clear is the oft-repeated claim that with it the culture wars of the 1960s have finally been “won,” or at least that the two sides have agreed to a cease-fire.

    Vietnam vets, pollster James Zogby points out, are oh-for-the-last-three elections, and vets overall oh-for-the-last five. Race has been put away, perhaps since Obama’s post-Wright speech and certainly since his election. (That particular cease-fire, as it were, was immeasurably aided by McCain’s decision, not always honored by his campaign, to stay clear of former Obama spiritual guide Reverand Jeremiah Wright in particular and race more generally).

    Gender? It turns out the Hillary supporters came around to Obama after all. When feminists blasted Sarah Palin for working despite having five children and conservatives insisted they’d never had an issue with unmarried teen pregnancies, it became clear that yesterday’s core principles had been reduced to this election’s politically expedient positions.

    The era-ending nature of Obama’s win has been vouched for by no less an authority of the old culture wars than William Ayers. Writing in These Times after the election, the Weatherman founder turned Hyde Park friend of the Chicago machine writes:

    “The idea that the 2008 election may be the last time in American political life that the ’60s plays any role whatsoever is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, let’s get over the nostalgia and move on.

    On the other, the lessons we might have learned from the black freedom movement and from the resistance against the Vietnam War have never been learned. To achieve this would require that we face history fully and honestly, something this nation has never done.”

    Ayers is right that we haven’t faced history, in part because Americans are always so busy trying to bury it. We have opted to use Obama – who referred to himself in The Audacity of Hope as “A blank screen on which people of vastly differently political stripes project their own views” – as a proxy for history. With his election, the old politics are behind us.

    Or not. As Mario Cuomo might say, it’s a poetic notion but it won’t survive four years of prose.

    By the time the election was called for Obama at 11:00 Tuesday night, it was already clear that the old racial, ethnic, gender, class and regional antagonisms remain very much in play.

    The heated and at times nasty name calling between blacks and gays (mostly aimed at the former by the latter) in the aftermath of Proposition 8’s passage in California even as those same voters gave Obama a 23-point, 2.6 millon vote win, represents one illustration. (Gays incidentally, preferred Clinton to Obama by more than 2-to-1 in the state’s primary, according to CNN exit polling). Arizona and Florida voters also passed referenda defining marriage as between one man and one woman, and Arkansas voters passed one prohibiting unmarried couples from adopting children or serving as foster parents.

    It’s clear that the strong generational consensus of equal rights for gays isn’t a broader American consensus just yet.

    New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s dismissal of the automakers’ appeals for federal monies (which spawned a predictable round of New York to Detroit: Drop Dead headlines) is another, representing both the clash of cities and regions for their share of the federal bailout funds, and the clash of wealthy Wall Street Democrats with what’s left of the old industrial union branch of the party.

    So too will be coming tension between the party’s urban core and vulnerable new exurban House members, who may not easily accept the urbanist green agenda embraced by the party’s city-oriented congressional leadership, and which would pass tremendous upfront and long term costs to industries ranging from airlines and aerospace to truckers and energy producers. Whatever the potential environmental and economic benefits down the road, this tack will prove politically difficult to implement if the economy continues to struggle and oil prices continue to fall.

    More generally, there’s the tension between the socially libertarian instincts of younger voters and their pro-big government tilt, especially but not exclusively on the environment, a dynamic that’s just now beginning to play out but augurs conflict to come.

    Then there’s the continued dissatisfaction of those Hillary voters who gritted their teeth while pulling the lever for Obama. What if the Republicans find a more effective and proven female standard-bearer than Sarah Palin?

    New black and Latino voters culturally closer to the religious right than to the wealthier liberals with whom they united in support of Obama have not had a chance to express those culturally conservative views. Perhaps a Bobby Jindal or some other non-white Republican figure could emerge to exploit these potential fissures once memories the anti-immigration fervor of the GOP primaries has faded.

    It’s critical to recognize that all these conflicts – regional, geographic, ethnic and philosophical – were suppressed this year by the economy, which drove voters of all stripes running to the Democrats. When the economy improves, or becomes the problem of the Democrats as opposed to George Bush’s cross to bear, many issues now considered resolved won’t be.

    Barack Obama may have made history but he did not end it. As we have seen over the past decades, the end of one set of conflicts often sets the stage for another. This is likely to be the case again.

    Harry Siegel is a contributing editor at Politico. hsiegel@politico.com