ABSTRACT
Barack Obama has said that he looks at "some issues differently as a consequence of being of a slightly different generation". But there is no strong generational identity in the wake of the baby boomers, and what Obama calls for is not so much a repudiation of the 1960s generation as a fulfillment of some of its ideals. Obama suggested that he may have a particular ability to bring the country together around a pragmatic, commonsense agenda for change that probably has a generational element to it as well. The time Obama spent as a community organizer had a profound impact on his approach to politics. Obama was the director of the Developing Communities Project in the mid-1980s, spending four years organizing African American neighborhoods on the segregated South Side of Chicago. Obama was influenced in his approach to community organizing by the theories of Saul Alinsky.
