I have been away from the computer for a few days, but regular posting now begins again.

Via a TPM reader post I can’t seem to locate again right now, I found this very nice post from web browsing inventor Marc Andreessen, “An Hour and a Half with Barack Obama.” Obviously most of us non-millionaires would not get that long an audience, but I found the point of view interesting. Apparently a big Democratic donor, Andreessen clearly has a lot of experience being asked for money by candidates. “Most of them talk at you. Listening is not their strong suit — in fact, many of them aren’t even very good at faking it.” His hackles were up, but Obama came across “as a normal human being, with a normal interaction style, and a normal level of interest in the people he’s with and the world around him. We were able to have an actual, honest-to-God conversation, back and forth, on a number of topics.” I have had no direct Obama encounters myself, but his response to the Wright controversy struck me as a well-spoken normal person’s response to offensive remarks by an older friend or relative. He expressed his disagreement but refused to disown a loved one just to further his own career.

Naturally when talking with a computer entrepreneur Obama showed a lot of interest of new technologies like YouTube and social networking sites. Yet he also showed some actual knowledge. Not surprisingly, these new channels of communication have also been one of the most effective aspects of Obama’s campaign. Apparently, his speeches on YouTube have often gotten more viewers than the cable news channels.

The part of Andreessen’s post that resonated most strongly with me was an observation that has occurred to me too: Obama “is the first credible post-Baby Boomer presidential candidate.” This is a good thing.

The Baby Boomers are best defined as the generation that came of age during the 1960′s — whose worldview and outlook was shaped by Vietnam plus the widespread social unrest and change that peaked in the late 1960′s.

Post-Boomers are those of us, like me, who came of age in the 1970′s or 1980′s — after Vietnam, after Nixon, after the “sexual revolution” and the cultural wars of the 1960′s.

One of the reasons Senator Obama comes across as so fresh and different is that he’s the first serious presidential candidate who isn’t either from the World War II era (Reagan, Bush Sr, Dole, and even McCain, who was born in 1936) or from the Baby Boomer generation (Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, and George W. Bush).

He’s a post-Boomer.

Most of the Boomers I know are still fixated on the 1960′s in one way or another — generally in how they think about social change, politics, and the government.

It’s very clear when interacting with Senator Obama that he’s totally focused on the world as it has existed since after the 1960′s — as am I, and as is practically everyone I know who’s younger than 50.

Now, Andreessen may have been thinking about a “third way,” centrist approach to economics or partisanship, but the comment made think of the cultural controversies of the past month’s campaigning. Boomers and their elders do seem to be fixated on the 1960s, but they are often negatively fixated. After all, the great overarching trend of the Baby Boomers’ political adulthood (1967-on) has been a shift to the right based on voters reacting against the changes of the 1960s. The 18-year-old franchise helped bring about the 1972 Nixon landslide, and if not for Watergate, the rightward trend would have continued unimpeded through the 1990s.

Of course the real fixation is on the whole postwar generational psychodrama. There are an awful lot of Baby Boomer (and older) liberals and ex-liberals and ex-radicals who have never gotten over the switch from Kennedy-era integrationism to the angrier rhetoric and economic demands of Black Power and harbor a weird susceptibility to the Cold War logic and attendant foreign military adventures of their youth. It is a myth that most Baby Boomers actively opposed the Vietnam War, but these days the Boomers and many of their children seem to feel that opposing any war, no matter how ill-conceived, somehow dishonors the sacrifices of their World War II generation forebears.

Like Andreessen, I feel that Obama’s post-Boomer age cohort, people now in their 30s & 40s, has had a very different experience. We have lived more conservatively in many ways, what with AIDs and the drug crackdown and all, but we also tend to take the post-1960s world as a given. In our lives, there has never any point to getting steamed over the consequences of our society’s attempts at racial and gender equality. Neither have we had any reason to preen ourselves over our support of the right causes way back when, nor to resent the fact that blacks declined to quietly accept white liberal leadership in perpetuity. The seething resentment that Hillary and Bill Clinton seem to feel over someone like Barack Obama daring to challenge them is quite foreign, at least to me. Obama’s calm refusal to either back down from or fully engage them in the politics of Nixonian resentment seems like the only decent and logical course. By the same token, Obama seems unlikely to mix up belligerence with strength the way that most of the Baby Boomers and elders currently in power, and the Clintons, seem to do. No one in growing up American in the second half of the 20th century was able to escape having a head filled with tales of World War II and the 1960s, but those of us with fewer personal connections to those tales are probably better prepared to move on, which we really, really need to do.