From the pages of the The London Evening Standard (May 25, 2011)
“Even more important than this personal identification, however, has been the gradual and unexpected emergence of a generational self-consciousness. Cameron is 44, Obama five years his senior: they are the first heads of government to be drawn from the ranks of Generation X.
‘Both of us came of age during the 1980s,’ they began their Times article – a spectacularly self-conscious way in which to do so…For Cameron and Obama, the equivalent formative experience was the final phase of the Cold War and its conclusion with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Each generation confronts a challenge: for Churchill and Roosevelt it was the global defeat of fascism; for Kennedy and Macmillan the unravelling of empire and the ideological division of the world; for Clinton and Blair the post-Cold War landscape and the perils and opportunities of globalisation.
For Cameron and Obama the equivalent challenge is the Arab Spring…
…The baby boomers left Generation X with a lousy fiscal legacy, and now they must clear it up…Both Obama and Cameron remain optimists…”