Baby boomer candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton battle it out.

Baby boomer candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton battle it out.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — Here come the ’60s again, hijacking another presidential campaign with their endless generational pathologies.

This time it’s John McCain, Vietnam vet, trashing Woodstock and Hillary Clinton, a woman some view as the high priestess of the baby boomer left.

You may have missed it, if you’re not a navel-gazing boomer (“Hey! Woodstock was really important! Because we were THERE, man! In the MUD!”) or an old Establishment square still disdainful of your once-long-haired younger cousins.

McCain scored points at a recent Republican presidential debate by criticizing a $1 million federal earmark request from Clinton and Chuck Schumer, fellow boomer-New York Democratic senators, for a museum to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock concert, a cultural touchstone for the boomer generation.

Said McCain: “Now my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.”

Big laughs and cheers. That last bit was a reference to the fact that McCain languished in a North Vietnamese prison as The Who celebrated “My Generation” for about 500,000 stoned rock fans whose chief deprivation was a port-a-potty shortage.

McCain’s line went over so well that he turned it into two television ads, complete with dancing hippie chick and psychedelic colors.

The ads highlight his anti-spending crusade, but they’re more significant in that they draw squarely from a tried-and-true politico-cultural playbook: Raise middle America’s qualms about Democrats generally and the Clintons specifically by painting them as barely reconstructed, untrustworthy hippie-lefties. Certainly, Bill and Hillary looked the part back in the day, all that hair and denim. (Although it appears that neither went to Woodstock.)