Blame it on the baby boom.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Pundit Watch - criticizing Bill Clinton - Column

Here's the current in-joke among the pundits: Why has Bill Clinton had no honeymoon with the mainstream press? Because baby boomers traditionally have their honeymoons before their marriages.

What are we to make of this little quip, now making the rounds of the talk shows? The pundits use it to excuse the glaring discrepancy between the supine sycophancy of the press under Reagan-Bush and its newfound Ninja warrior stance toward Clinton. But the baby-boom "peg" reveals how nervous many of the neocon media are at the prospect of some 1960s values and ideas being legitimized.

As the first President to idolize Elvis Presley and have a favorite Beatle (Paul, I regret to report), Clinton raises generational and class anxieties about baby boomers actually coming into power.

Few generations have been more maligned. During the 1980s, at the height of 1960s-bashing, the media stereotype jelled. Boomers - and we're all alike, of course - were overindulged as children, which led us to become hopelessly self-absorbed and self-centered. We were pathetically naive about the Vietnam war, civil rights, and governmental reform and, in the end, frivolous and superficial in our political commitments. When we didn't get our way, we all decided to become stockbrokers or corporate attorneys. We are, at our core, hypocrites, because we denounced materialism in our youth and then became craven money-grubbers as adults. Culturally, we're bankrupt.

To remind us that all hippies turned into yuppies, This Week with David Brinkley did an entire show on baby boomers, featuring such typical representatives as Bill Gates, the billionaire CEO of Microsoft. Brinkley, George Will, and Sam Donaldson kept emphasizing how rich Gates is, cementing the correlation between baby boomers and avarice unchained.

While interviewing another guest, Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, Donaldson asserted that Bonfire of the Vanities captured the baby boomer perfectly, "the type that says, |I'm gonna get mine, I know how to do it, and I can beat these old fogies.'" When Wenner suggested that you can't "beat up an entire generation," Donaldson whined, "But you beat up our generation." On a later show, pit bull Donaldson chewed over George Stephanopoulos as if he were raw hamburger; the generational resentments were palpable. The fact that baby boomers are, in general, financially worse off than their predecessors wasn't allowed to taint the "boomer-equals-fat-cat" equation.

Baby-boom bashing often...