NEWS ANALYSIS : Age Issue Would Likely Shape Bush-Clinton Debate : Campaign: Each so exemplifies his era’s experiences strategists see a baby-boomer vs. ‘GI generation’ clash.

Looming ahead in a likely fall campaign between President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is the first electoral collision between the two generations that have dominated American life for the last 45 years.

At age 67, Bush is, in all probability, the last President who will be drawn from the “GI generation” that fought in World War II and manned the barricades of the Cold War.

If Clinton, 45, holds on to win the Democratic race, he would become the first presidential nominee from the baby boom--the 76-million-member generation that has revolutionized America’s social mores, but not yet exerted the political influence many of its members have considered their birthright since the turbulent 1960s.

The 22-year age difference between Bush and Clinton would be the largest such gulf between two major presidential candidates in this century. It creates a generation gap that could shape the debate between Bush and a challenger who is six weeks younger than the President’s oldest son.

To a considerable extent, Republican strategists believe, Clinton’s greatest challenge is overcoming questions of personal morality and honesty rooted in such indivisible baby-boomer experiences as the use of drugs, attempts to avoid the Vietnam-era draft and the sexual revolution.

“Clinton is a guy who enjoyed the stereotypical baby-boomer lifestyle,” said one senior Republican strategist familiar with the Bush campaign’s thinking. “Probably by definition that will cause him problems.”

For Bush, by contrast, the most pressing task may be to convince voters that he has the vision to lead the nation beyond the Cold War challenges that molded his generation. Clinton took his first broad swing at that target in a major address Wednesday, arguing that Bush’s views on environmental issues were outdated and “shaped in another era, when the world faced other threats.”

At a time when most voters see Washington as bereft of innovative responses to the nation’s problems, the argument that Bush is trapped in the past worries some Republicans. “I think that is really behind a lot of Bush’s decline in the polls--that people sense he is not as creative, not as relevant when it comes to post-Cold War issues,” says conservative strategist Jeffrey Bell, the author of “Populism and Elitism,” a new book on the role of cultural divisions in American politics.

Notwithstanding Clinton’s remarks this week, neither the President nor his challenger has yet stressed appeals to generational solidarity--or a generational critique of their opponent. But because each so exemplifies the experiences of his era, many analysts believe that a race between them would inevitably be colored by contrasting generational imagery--with the Republicans tarring Clinton with the excesses of the 1960s and the Democrats painting Bush as unable to adapt to the post-Cold War realities of the 1990s.

At age 61, Ross Perot, the Texas businessman contemplating an independent bid for the White House, is largely a bystander in this generational skirmish. Although only six years younger than Bush, he belongs to what one recent book labeled the “silent generation”--which was too young to fight in World War II and too old to participate in the cultural changes of the 1960s, and has never elected a President.

Leaving Perot aside, the sharpest generational line of attack in the fall would likely center on the questions about Clinton’s past.

Since 1968, Republican presidential campaigns have condemned the tumultuous cultural upheavals of the ‘60s--when millions of Americans questioned attitudes toward family, sex, race relations, government and the military, to the horror of millions of other Americans.

From the start, Clinton has positioned his candidacy to blunt these repeated GOP attacks on Democrats as cultural elitists contemptuous of middle-class values; he has broken from liberal dogma to support the death penalty and demand greater “personal responsibility” from recipients of government aid, such as welfare.

But some Democratic strategists fear that although Clinton may have inoculated himself from a GOP cultural offensive on policy grounds, he has left himself vulnerable on the personal front--as if he had built a fort without a back wall. Many Democrats expect the Bush campaign--and the independent committees now forming to support his reelection--to use the questions about Clinton raised by the draft and the difficulties in his marriage to portray him as a cultural liberal.

“It’s too plausible for them not to try it,” says Samuel L. Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego, who is advising the Clinton campaign.

For now, GOP strategists insist these questions about Clinton’s character have so permeated the electorate that they won’t have to directly raise them in the fall. Instead, they argue, they can wound Clinton simply by associating Bush with the prototypical values of the World War II generation he represents.

“This is not a 2 by 4 where you have to hit people over the head,” says GOP consultant Craig Shirley, who is working with a conservative group now raising money to launch an independent campaign on Bush’s behalf. “You just constantly remind people of what George and Barbara Bush stand for, and, therefore, what Bill and Hillary Clinton don’t--family, military service, honesty, strength of character, integrity.”

One sharp generational contrast many Republicans hope to draw is between Barbara Bush--who embodies the “GI generation” of women who put their first priority on their families--and the career-minded Hillary Clinton. GOP strategists believe Hillary Clinton betrayed disrespect for full-time mothers when she forcefully declared that critics of her law firm’s role in Arkansas would have preferred her to “have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.”

“Hillary is where the generational fault line in the campaign really lies,” says one senior figure in the Bush camp.

The GOP may also draw a contrast between the young George Bush, who volunteered to serve in World War II, and the young Bill Clinton, who agonized and took steps to avoid service when faced with Vietnam. “We might use his whole episode with the draft to point out where he is in his sense of duty to country,” says Fred Steeper, the Bush campaign’s pollster.

So far, the most bitter irony for Clinton is that those who share his experiences--the baby boomers themselves--seem to be unsympathetic to his attempts to explain them.

Government surveys show that at least 30 million to 40 million baby boomers--roughly half the total--admit having smoked marijuana. And while at least one-third of men in Bush’s generation served abroad in the “good war” against the Nazis and imperial Japan, less than one in 12 baby-boomer men actually served in Vietnam during that bitterly divisive war; as many as two-thirds of the rest took active steps to avoid either induction or a combat assignment, according to research by author William Strauss.

But with those common experiences behind them, some analysts speculate that baby boomers may be the most skeptical toward Clinton’s claims that he did not attempt to avoid serving--and did not even inhale when he sampled marijuana at Oxford University. In several recent national surveys, Clinton’s own age group was the most likely to say he lacked sufficient honesty to serve as President. And exit polls in such states as Michigan, Illinois and New York have found Clinton running less strongly among his own age group than among other voters, especially the elderly.

In the fall, Clinton aides hope his support for abortion rights will win back baby boomers unhappy with the President’s opposition to legalized abortion. But for Clinton, the dangerous potential here is of a generational whipsaw: being condemned by some in older and younger generations for behavior that was common among his own--and being abandoned by many of his contemporaries for not forthrightly defending their experience.

“There is no way he can solve his problems with one generation without creating worse ones with the other, given the direction he’s going,” says Strauss, co-author of “Generations,” a recent book studying the role of generational succession in American life.

But some analysts believe Clinton may be able to draw other contrasts that defuse the Republican cultural attacks--and also allow him to use the generation gap against Bush.

In their internal discussions, Clinton aides are weighing two lines of defense against the cultural assault they expect from the GOP. One is to draw a different boundary that puts Clinton in the American mainstream and Bush outside.

This theme would attempt to portray Clinton as a product of “the real America” where lives are typically messier than in the Connecticut suburbs where Bush was reared.

Under this strategy, the campaign would argue that the Arkansas governor understands the realities of American life more keenly than Bush because Clinton has been shaped by experiences far more common than the President’s privileged upbringing: a difficult childhood marked by confrontations with an alcoholic and abusive step-parent; an education secured by scholarships; a commitment to community reflected in his decision to return home to Arkansas to build his career, and even his struggle to hold together his marriage in an era when one of every two unions end in divorce.

The second option under consideration is for Clinton to link his own experiences to the broader evolution of the baby-boom generation from protesters to parents. “The key for Bill Clinton is not so much identifying with the generational experience in Vietnam, but the generational experience since Vietnam,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster.

Publicly, Clinton has done relatively little of that. But in interviews last fall, Clinton did suggest a theme that could rise in prominence, when he portrayed his interest in policies that encourage “personal responsibility” and “community” as an outgrowth of changes in his own life from the 1960s to the 1980s.

“A lot of the language of personal life, of people of our generation, has been around rights and self-fulfillment and all that,” he said. “Maybe I’m just reflecting a rite of passage of my generation, as well as my own personal voyage through life, but the older I get the more I realize that . . . all of us at critical junctures in our life have to make decisions that involve putting other people or the general interest ahead of our immediate interest or impulses.”

Beyond these defenses, Clinton aides believe that his youth inherently gives him more credibility as an agent of change, when both candidates are fighting for that label. Clinton has tentatively begun to underscore that comparison by echoing a generational argument first raised by a former rival, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey.

In his presidential campaign, Kerrey praised Bush and his generation for winning the Cold War, then maintained that new challenges demanded fresh approaches of a new generation. Clinton moved toward that approach in his environmental address Wednesday.

“If Clinton can get away with saying George Bush is old and doesn’t get it anymore, there’s great power in that,” worries one well-placed Republican operative.

Times researcher Cary Schneider contributed to this story.