President Obama becomes a Washington tweener

President Obama becomes a Washington tweener
Washington venerates its ancients,idealizing and idolizing the elder statesman, lavishing perks and institutional potency as rewards for seniority.
Yet the city also runs on the fuel of youth,the recent college grads who staff the offices,and the rising professionals whose ambitions juice the city’s striver culture.
In the fuzzy middle between those poles lie the 50-somethings, federal Washington’s version of tweeners, a demographic group fraught with generation-straddling, career-tweaking, life-altering conundrums:Dump that modest-paying but idealistic government gig for private-sector riches? Hang in there for one more term in hopes that a committee chairmanship finally will be yours?

On Thursday, President Obama —one of American history’s most precocious achievers — joins the ranks of Washington 50-somethings, an age span he shares with 29 U.S. senators but just one of 16 Senate committee chairmen (that would be Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who sits atop the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee). Reaching the pinnacle of American power so early means Obama will have to figure out what to do with himself for a big chunk of his 50s, whether in 2013, when he could become a 51-year-old one-termer, or in 2017, when he could leave office as a 55-year-old two-termer.

Obama becomes just the third president to turn 50 in office in more than 130 years, following Theodore Roosevelt, whose low-key 50th in 1908 prompted a stream of messenger boys delivering congratulatory notes to the White House, and Bill Clinton, who celebrated hitting the mid-century mark in 1996 with a star-studded party and fundraiser. As Obama’s 50th approaches, he’s taken to quipping about getting grayer, but he still gets up and down a basketball court without reaching for the oxygen tank. Obama celebrated his 49th last year by dining with Oprah Winfrey and a few other friends while his wife and kids were vacationing. This year, he’s expected to do it up big, with a party in Chicago featuring Jennifer Hudson and Herbie Hancock, and a $35-a-head fundraiser.

On the occasion of Obama’s 50th, five prominent Washingtonians — uber-pundit Paul Begala, lobbyist Scott Reed, former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis — agreed to help unpack what it means to reach that milestone in the nation’s capital, a city with a culture like none other in the United States. The group includes one person who joined Washington’s tweener cadre in each of the past five years. A common thread, expressed in varying forms, emerged from these conversations: Washington functions as a transient city given to a permanent obsession with who’s up and who’s down, who merits being kowtowed to and who will be doing the kowtowing. And the 50s is the decade when the city often measures whether you’re a player with true staying power or just another so-and-so passing through.