Psychodrama what?
I take a sigh of relief that I was not the only one to do a double-take of sorts when reading Paul Krugman make this comment:
By the way, it was during the heyday of the baby boom generation that crude racism became unacceptable. Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,†might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.
(A search for “Krugman” “baby boomer” and “psychodrama” will get you most prominently wonkette.)
Where does this come from? Barack Obama surely hasn’t been raising the issue of “Baby Boomer Psychodrama” at every speech he’s been giving, and while I suppose you can read that into his message, I’d have to dismiss that as an example of baby boomer psycho-drama.
Nay. Apparently Obama wrote it into his second book — The Audacity of Hope, the more politically posturing and therefor inferior to his first book Dreams of My Father. Krugman’s thoughts are more annoying as, even though he went off an aside of calling Obama a Cult Leader, I’ve generally thought Krugman was better than most columnist at explaining policy differences in why his preferred Clinton candidate was preferable to him than Obama. I’ve generally thought these slight differences didn’t matter much, and my ponderances with Obama have had more to do with whether his rhetorical stances has any room for a basic partisan fight… which, actually does in a way go back to Krugman’s concerns about not owning up to the Culture Wars.
As for “Baby-boomer psycho-drama”, the author of Nixon-land in an interview with Reason magazine gives us this:
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reason: The last line in the book is, “How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.†It says something about the book that this felt really compelling as I read it.
Perlstein: (Laughs.)
reason: But then I thought, hold on. Do we live in Nixonland today? The intensity of the violence and paranoia that you describe actually feels pretty alien. Now the hard-core Red Team and Blue Team partisans have to work themselves up artificially into the sort of frenzies that came naturally to people in the ’60s.
Perlstein: It’s a fair criticism. When I say Nixonland is with us still, that could literally mean that things are just as ideologically intense as they were from 1965 to 1972. Or it could be that things were so ideologically intense from 1965 to 1972 that we’re still kind of trailing off the exhaust fumes.
I think the latter is true. There’s a lot of surplus rage from the ’60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton’s earmark for a Woodstock museum. I have a friend whose people live in Sulphur, Louisiana, and they still talk about Woodstock as basically a visitation from hell.
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Anyway…