The election that got me into politics was the 1992 presidential race. Prior to that, I was decidedly apolitical. I had grown up listening to my Reagan Democrat grandfather fight over politics with my New Deal Democrat grandmother, and while I had the distinct impression that at one time the two had agreed on everything, from FDR to JFK to Nixon, the post-Reagan political alignment sent each of them to the polls to cancel out the other’s vote, my grandmother staying loyal to the party of her youth while my grandfather voted Republican but refused to identify as one. I wanted no part of any of this.

Then came 1992. I was fourteen years old, and if my Catholic, pro-union, Midwestern Democratic family and community had instilled anything into me, it was the notion that George H. W. Bush was the natural enemy of people like us — that he was a closeted Rockefeller Republican. I didn’t know much about all that, but I did know that the 41st president seemed clueless whenever I heard him speak. It was almost as if something had whisked him up and away from the real world. Maybe that was why, I thought, my parents’ entire Catholic parish basically marched to the polls during the 1992 primaries to vote for Pat Buchanan.

When the nominees were selected, many of the folks in my industrial community turned to Bill Clinton. But to me, this charming fellow seemed too slick by half. He struck me as someone who meant well, but who had neither the willingness nor the ability to make the kinds of seismic changes that were necessary in our country. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what these changes were, but I intuited that there were major structural changes that needed to be made. And I knew that neither Bush nor Clinton would be able to make them.

Then came the odd little man from Texas who clicked the “on” switch that jump-started my political psyche. H. Ross Perot turned out to be a loon and demagogue, but I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know was that finally — finally — someone in politics was willing to talk straight. Perot seemingly viewed himself as an applicant for CEO of the country; his sole goal was to solve problems, not to advance ideology. Born a cynic, I have never been a fan of ideology, which is an attempt by fanciful men who have nothing better to do to fit our complicated world into a simplistic mold, or to make a sometimes bland and boring world far sexier than it actually is. Perot, with his focus on the empirical — where did the man get those charts? — won me over.

But Ross was bonkers, and our nation was left with a Bush and a Clinton to choose from. I watched as my Midwestern Catholic parish once again marched lock-step to the polls to vote for Bill in November. I tried to convince myself that something good would come of it, but I knew I was lying to myself. I think my grandfather felt the same way. He’d been pulling for Ross too.

***

Little did I know what a witness to history I would be. Those of us who are old enough to remember the politics of the last two decades have experienced two things. First, we’ve seen the totality of the American version of the War of the Roses. The House of Bush is likely gone, with its second president leaving office with so high a disapproval that a Bush won’t be elected dog-catcher for at least a generation. And with it goes the House of Clinton, the once certain 44th president reduced to a fixture in the Senate. The Empress of the West becomes Senator Bore.

But these last few years have featured something else too. With the next president virtually assured to be either Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama, the sixteen-year era of Baby Boomer presidents is coming to an early and abrupt close. The Greatest Generation gave us three decades of presidents. The Boomers gave us two very flawed men. I should be surprised. Instead, all I have to say is: it figures.

The Boomers are indeed a motley crew. Their entire identity is shaped by two things: the Cold War and the cultural revolution. They grew up watching their parents watch Joe McCarthy, and asking them why they had to duck and cover under their desks at school. They were told that the world was split in two, that the other half was comprised of Reds, and that Reds were bad. Then they came of age, and the world seemed to split in two all over again. Pick a side, they were told. You were either for Vietnam or sympathized with Ho Chi Minh. You either practiced free love or derided the Second Vatican Council. You either burnt your bra or married your high school sweetheart. If you weren’t a hipster, you were a prude. If you weren’t a prude, you were a hipster. Perhaps the world just ripped itself apart one too many times for any generation to handle. Perhaps it should’ve been expected that an entire generation would rip itself apart, and then run to the poles of its new dichotomy, creating an ebullient map of red and of blue.

But the nation said goodbye to all that this year. It did so when both parties nominated for president men who were most assuredly not part of the Boomer wars. In so doing, voters of both parties rejected men and women who embodied the Boomer era, and who were quite eager to keep the red/blue divide intact. A contest between Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, for example, would’ve been the ultimate Boomer election. It would’ve pitted Ward Cleaver against Gloria Steinem to fight about whether we should be looking at porn or using contraception. Maybe Pope John XXIII could even be a subject of argument. After all, what’s politics for if not to fight over dead issues into eternity? The Boomer wars are sort of like one of Dante’s circles of Hell. Sisyphus ever pushes the boulder up the cliff. But he never quite reaches the top.

***

McCain and Obama have won their respective nominations, but the true winners are those of us who realize that things like the Cold War, Vietnam, and the cultural revolution are part of history, and that history, while useful, while intriguing, and while invaluable, is ultimately behind us. It’s not something to be perpetually rehashed for sport, not when there are real people having real problems in the real world. Academics have the luxury of debating what would’ve happened if there had been no Communist Bloc or no cultural revolution. The rest of us realize that those thing happened, that they’re over, and that we have to move forward to make our own history.

There are serious problems looming on the horizon, and even those that the American people don’t understand, they intuit. Our ancestral lands on the European continent have already surrendered to our new enemies, those that emanate from the sands of Arabdom and from the mystical lands of the Orient. In certain parts of Northern Europe, total cultural appeasement has been the response of Europeans over the demands of settling and seemingly conquering Islamists. European liberals, the supposed defenders of liberty, have taken to blaming rape victims for the crimes committed against them by Islamist men. After all, if the European girls would only conform to the dress code of the Islamists, none of this would happen, they say.

And the West slowly dies.

Meanwhile, China and India are poised to become the globe’s newest economic superpowers. In these nations, there are no disagreements over whether it’s the purpose of government to do this or to do that. To them, it’s the purpose of government to do what is required to make a great nation. And so while our populace remains grossly ill-prepared for the challenges of the new, global economy thanks to the kneejerk Left and its patronage of the teachers’ unions, as well as the kneejerk Right and its insistence that providing access to education and job training beyond the 12th grade is not a governmental role (an absolute absurdity in a global economy such as ours), China looks to a future in which it is the master of the universe and we are a mere satellite.

Americans are now just beginning to feel the birth pangs of this new world. Rising fuel prices are lowering Americans’ standard of living, resulting in their president, the supposed Emperor of the World, groveling at the feet of the disgusting House of Saud. Americans can no longer afford the education they need to begin a marketable career and live a middle class life. They can no longer afford to purchase a decent home. And they can no longer afford the treatment they need when they become ill. While the Boomer Left and Boomer Right have spent countless hours fighting over whether the top marginal income tax rate should go up or down by four percentage points, the fundamentals of the American economy have been gutted. And while the Boomers use gay marriage as a proxy fight for “the pill” and Vatican II, regular Americans are wondering why they are now paying twelve dollars for a sandwich and a bag of chips.

***

By making the choices that they’ve made this year, Americans have said goodbye to all that. The Greatest Generation has joined forces with Gens X and Y to break the news to the Boomers that we don’t want them running our country anymore. In 1992, the dirty word of the election was “Reagan/Bush,” and all of the problems that those two presidents supposedly caused us. But what about the legacy of Clinton/Bush? Just as the fourteen-year-old version of myself intuited, Bill Clinton was neither willing nor able to make the tough decisions that this country needed to make in a time of peace and prosperity, from saving Social Security to cracking down on Saddam Hussein and Islamist terrorist groups. That left George W. Bush with the mess to clean up, a man who was ill-prepared to handle the platter he was given and whose fellow Boomers in the House and Senate — and in the annals of the Executive Branch — offered little wisdom on either side of the aisle. The last sixteen years have been a tribute to the polarization and petty wars of the Boomers, and they’ve left the rest of us with trillions of dollars in debt, an endangered American dream, and a world ready to eat us alive.

So goodbye to all that. Goodbye to the House of Bush. Goodbye to the House of Clinton. And hello to the first president in two decades who will belong to neither dynasty. The end of one era marks the advent of another, as we move ever forward into the brilliant and terrible dawn of a brave new world.