Equal Time

NY Times:

"Shushing the Baby Boomers"--THE time has come, Senator Barack Obama says, for the baby boomers to get over themselves.

In taking the first steps toward a presidential candidacy last week, Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961 and considers himself a member of the post-boomer generation, said Americans hungered for “a different kind of politics,” one that moved beyond the tired ideological battles of the 1960s.

To make his point, Mr. Obama, a Democrat from Illinois in his first term in the Senate, announced the formation of his presidential exploratory committee in a video streamed on his Web site. He is tieless and relaxed and oh so cool.

Mr. Obama calculates that Americans of all ages are sick of the feuding boomers and ready to turn to the generation that came of age after Vietnam, after the campus culture wars between freaks and straights, and after young people had given up on what überboomer Hillary Rodham Clinton (who made her own announcement on the Web yesterday) called in a 1969 commencement address a search for “a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.”

WaPo:

"For the Clinton Candidacy, a Soft Launch"---One day after declaring for president, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) gave her first public glimpse of how she will run: as the mother of a daughter, as a serious student of policy and as a two-term senator from New York.

With minimal staff, no family members and not even a sound system to amplify her remarks, Clinton appeared on Sunday at a colorless community clinic in Manhattan to announce a piece of health-care legislation, her first real outing since launching her presidential bid online. Despite a media crush that overwhelmed the participants, Clinton treated the event like a routine stop, acknowledging only during a question period at the end that she had finally decided to run.

"I am worried about the future of our country, and I want to help put it back on the right course, so that we can work together to meet the challenges that confront us at home and abroad in order to secure a better future for all," Clinton said when asked why she wants to be president, embracing the 2008 campaign after more than six years of frenzied speculation about her plans.

"I believe that I am in the best position to be able to do that," she said. And she repeated her latest mantra: "I'm in to win. And that's what I intend to do."