The 16-year itch

Michael Barone notes that voters seem primed this year to pick someone with little political experience to run the country. The votes for Obama and Huckabee confirm that theory. Personally, I think it's amazing that, with all the uncertainty and dangers in the world today, people in Iowa would go out and vote for the candidates with the least foreign policy experience, but so they did. Barone looks at the pattern that, every 16 years from 1960, 1976, and 1992, the electorate seems ready to throw the dice and send a relative novice to be the commander in chief.

Over time, the median-age voter in American elections has been about 45 years old. This means that the median-age voter in 1976 was born around 1931--old enough to have experienced post-World War II prosperity and foreign policy success, and then to have been disgusted by Vietnam and Watergate.

The median-age voter in 1992 was born around 1947 (the same year as Dan Quayle and Hillary Clinton, one year after Messrs. Clinton and Bush, one year before Mr. Gore). These voters came of age in the culture wars of the 1960s. They experienced stagflation and gas lines of the 1970s, and the prosperity and foreign policy successes of the 1980s. Mr. Clinton persuaded these voters to take a chance on change by promising not to radically alter policy. They rebuked him when he tried to break that promise, then for 14 years remained closely divided along culture lines as if the '60s never ended.

The median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1963, so he or she missed out on the culture wars of the '60s, and on the economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s. These voters have experienced low-inflation economic growth something like 95% of their adult lives--something true of no other generation in history. They are weary of the cultural polarization of our politics, relatively unconcerned about the downside risks of big government programs, and largely unaware of America's historic foreign policy successes. They are ready, it seems, to take a chance on an outside-the-system candidate.

And it looks like 2008 may well fit that pattern once again. I'm not thinking about Huckabee who I think (hope) will fade fast. But I think Obama's victory is an augury of what is going to happen all the way through to November. I don't see the Clintons being able to stop him and I can't see a Republican who will be able to defeat him so we may well fulfill that 16 year pattern once more.