The Summer of Baby Boomers and Presidents: Trump, Bush and Clinton born w/in 66 days of each other

Tomorrow - 14 June - is Donald Trump's birthday.

14 August 1945, Japan surrendered and 10 months later, Trump was born. Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all born within 66 days, classic baby boomers.

When Bill was born, his father had recently died in a car accident and his mother was working as a hair dresser.

When George was born, his grandfather (who would become a US senator) was a partner at a prestigious bank and his father (who of course went on to become president) was a student at Yale.

Curiously, George and Bill's lives weren't as different as you might think. The house George W. Bush grew up in (in Midland, TX) was fourteen hundred square feet. Both Laura and Hillary wore off-the-rack dresses at their wedding to a future president.

The three baby boomers became president in reverse birth order: Clinton at 46, Bush at 54, and Trump at 70.

Obama, too, gets the designation of baby boomer even though he was born 15 years after Clinton (and at 47, was a year older than Clinton when he became president).

As of inauguration day 2021, baby boomers will have served as president for 28 years in a row, and 20 of those years by three men all born in the same summer.

Trump's Birthday and the Baby Boomer Model of Leadership Expiration Date

Today is Donald Trump's birthday. He's 72.

Trump, George W. and Bill Clinton were all born within 66 days of each other in the summer of 1946, 9 to 11 months after the end of WWII. They are the very definition of baby boomer. Bill was elected at 46, George at 54, and and Donald at 70.

I suspect there is a "lead by end of 20th century" expiration date hidden somewhere on the back of their neck but the GOP are the guys who find something in the back of the fridge and say, "This says 'Sell by 2000' but it doesn't smell weird. I won't get sick if I eat it, will I?"

Post-War Politics? Beyond the Peace-niks and Hawks?

McCain's loss was the fifth by a presidential candidate to have the better war record. (Bush 41 lost to Clinton, as did Dole. Gore and Kerry lost to Bush 43. Now, McCain loses to Obama.)

Obama did gain in the primaries for having declared the Iraq invasion absurd (or something to that effect). In that sense, it would be easy to see his election as an anti-war vote. But I wonder if it is something more.

What if we're beyond the anti-war and pro-war protests that marked the politics of the baby boomers and into something beyond that, a world where the first order of business is not to allocate half of the discretionary budget to defense or to get caught up in the false promise of beating UAVs into desktop computers? What if the argument between hawks and peaceniks seems as quaint to modern voters as the argument between advocates of bell bottoms and crew cuts?

[Now if R World had an editor, he would point out that this is a largely meaningless post. Or would he? Hm. I'm going to stay with it anyway, in spite of my imaginary editor's misgivings about the possibility that it says very little.]

Market Plunge & Baby Boomers Bust

"Do what you love," they said. "Find work that you enjoy."

Now, finally, they tell us that this is because we are going to work into our late 80s.

10 years ago, about 80% of retirement plans were pension plans. If you work for 30 years and you are 60 years old, you'll get, say, 90% of your salary until you die.

Today, about 80% of retirement plans are 401(k), or IRAs. If you save for 30 years and you are 60 years old, you could be rich or you could be a pauper - no one knows. And the money you've saved might be enough to finance your retirement and your children's retirement - or might scarcely be enough to finance your grocery store habit through the end of next month.

This market crash is coming at a terrible time for the baby boomers who have just begun turning 60. To have the market drop by 30 to 40% just years before you were going to retire is terrible. No one has talked about the fact that their retirements have just been delayed by years. By the time the dust settles on this year, they may be the group that pays the biggest personal price.