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Daniel Henninger: Will Obama Let the Sunshine In?

How perfect it was that while running for president in 2008, the 40th anniversary of "1968," Barack Obama should denounce the 1960s. His candidacy and his times are bland compared to what was happening then, or so everyone thought.

The year 1968 had a torrent of cataclysmic political events, each of which might have destabilized any other year.

We just passed Robert Kennedy's assassination, and before that the Paris student riots in May 1968. Up next month, the Democratic convention in Chicago – with its pitched battles in Grant Park between the cops and antiwar demonstrators, the anti-Vietnam protests inside the hall, Mayor Richard Daley on home TVs screaming hysterically at Sen. Abraham Ribicoff.

Thus spake Sen. Barack Obama, b. 1961:

"There is no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton cannot deliver on. And part of it is generational. Sen. Clinton and others, they have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Sen. Clinton "and others" would include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, various Senate and House Committee chairmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, and much of the Congressional Black Caucus whose political formation started and stopped in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Insofar as many of the people running Sen. Obama's own party have spent the past four decades playing the Hatfields to the conservative McCoys, can one truly say he has freed himself from those times?

As someone might have said back then, sort of.

A phrase born in the '70s out of the feminist movement held that "the personal is political." As an epigram for the age, she got that right. Back then, it seemed to make sense.

Neither Barack Obama nor others of his generation can fathom the fantastic emotional intensity of 1968. It was a year submerged in physical and emotional violence. After the Martin Luther King assassination in April, many American cities erupted in violence and arson, most notably Washington, D.C. The smash-face antiwar movement screamed alongside.

For the then-young men and women of the liberal left, politics became, and remained, unapologetically personal. The falling away of restraint on personal behavior required that the new ethos had to be codified by politics and the courts. Fighting for the right to hang erotic art in a Cincinnati museum became their idea of crucial struggle. Their counterparts on the right were appalled. The point is that for both sides, 1968 was a political furnace; it forged belief systems that drive many in politics today, especially Democrats.

Hillary Clinton came out of this intensely fought milieu. Barack Obama did not. When Obama criticized the fights born back in the '60s, he was severing the personal from the political. He is personally very different from these people. (I wouldn't say this about Michelle Obama.)

What has struck me most about Obama's personality is that it conveys nearly no sense of irony. Hillary in stump speeches would respond to applause for her tales of woe by bobbing her head and forming her mouth into a knowing smirk. Obama doesn't do "knowingness." He's earnest and emotionally quiet. Making un-ironic earnestness seem charismatic is hard, but he's doing it.

His recent flip-flops on guns, the death penalty and Iraq suggest he is less inclined to belief-based '60s style activism than to pragmatic opportunism. The old school wanted to triumph. He wants to succeed.

The Democratic bloggers, truly a tribe descended from 1968, hate Obama's easeful flexibility. But it explains in part how he is slipping by with a standard liberal policy-set no one seems to notice. A lot of moderate Democrats and younger voters, who consider themselves mainly achievers rather than activists, are OK with this. They would rather vote for a flexible opportunist than a committed man of the left. So that's what they're getting....
Read entire article at WSJ