KEY POINTS:
It is now 40 years, we've been reminded, since 1968. Baby-boomers need no reminding why that year was important. Headlines suffice.
Tet Offensive. Paris student riots. Eugene McCarthy. Johnson resigns. Assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Chicago Democratic Convention. Hillary Clinton was 20 years old, Barack
Obama was 6. I think I know why Clinton was close to tears before the New Hampshire primary this week.
The world didn't change in 1968. That was just the year that 20-year-olds knew it would change when they took charge. Nixon was elected that November and again four years later when Hillary and Bill Clinton campaigned for McGovern.
But sometime between 1968 and 1972 the word feminism was coined. It was in 1970, I recall, that "the environment" made the cover of Time magazine. To Hillary it will seem like yesterday. She didn't expect change overnight. She knew it would take a while for her generation to come to power, and longer before a woman could be elected to the highest office in the United States.
But I don't think she was grieving for her gender this week when Obama led the polls into the primary, I think it was for her generation. Its time had come and quite possibly gone.
It must have struck her that the crowds clamouring for Obama are seeing what her contemporaries saw in an even younger senator named Kennedy in 1960. And she might have realised she has been criticising the inexperience of a man who is the same age as Bill was when he was elected.
That was 16 years ago now. Hardly anybody in 1992 made much of the fact that Kennedy's torch had passed to another new generation. Bill had been at pains to downplay his youth, what with the women and all.
He had led the Democrats back to the centre, championing a "middle class", welfare work-tests and free trade. The only change he espoused was technological rather than social.
Now it could be that Bill, big, boyish, brilliant but hardly a candidate for Mt Rushmore, is the only President from the protest movement.
The incumbent is a contemporary but he wasn't part of it in 1968. Quite the opposite; he wouldn't have joined a Vietnam march if it came through his fraternity house. That probably applies to all the Republicans running for president this year, except John McCain, who was a prisoner in Vietnam. His response to Hillary's proposed Woodstock memorial ("I was tied up at the time") is already a classic of the campaign.
I suspect that comment appeals to voters under 40. The seminal events of the 1960s will be no more alive for them than the Depression was for me. Hillary, with her slogan "change", never expected to be on the wrong side of a generation gap.
She looked shell-shocked the day before the vote. You can't fake that look. It evoked enough sympathy from over-40s, particularly women, to win the primary. But there is a long way to go. The turn-outs so far suggest, as she said after Iowa, the next president will be a Democrat. I still have difficulty imagining President Obama but probably that is my problem; I'm closer to Clinton's age.
Obama is pulling support from neutral voters as well as Democrats. He seems not to be standing for any particular change but nor did Kennedy. A fresh face, an outlook and manner more in touch with the times, a modest, intelligent, charming personality, those can be enough.
Two months ago his campaign looked finished. Clinton was leading the polls so consistently he should have packed it in. But he hung in for the primaries. He passed a test.
Hillary was not nearly as impressive when the pressure came on in Iowa, turning aggressive and, this week, desperate. The day she appeals for gender sympathy she is finished. Like Helen Clark, Hillary Clinton seeks election as a woman, not because she is a woman. I think she has done enough in the past year to prove a woman can win the Democrat Party's nomination for president and quite possibly the presidency.
I suspect Obama's generation did not need proof of that as much as mine does. He stands to prove a black can be elected, which would exceed anything imagined in 1968. Monuments to Martin Luther King in American cities today stand in black neighbourhoods so ramshackle you wouldn't live there. Blacks are no closer to King's dream.
To see an African-American in the White House might not work magic for them but it would come close. It would be the ultimate symbol of acceptance, equality and power. Blacks need that assurance much more than women do.
I wonder if that thought haunts Hillary too.
