(FORTUNE Magazine) – While nobody has made a big deal of it yet, there is a baby-boomer running for President. Bill Clinton, born August 19, 1946, rides the leading edge, the fortunate foam, of that demographic tsunami of 78 million Americans born from 1946 through 1964. One by one, the nonboomer candidates have been eliminated from the Democratic field: first Harkin, 52; then Kerrey, 48, who looked like a boomer but wasn't; then Tsongas, 51. Only Jerry Brown, who sometimes doesn't act his age, which is 54, remains between Clinton and the nomination. If the Arkansas governor prevails, November's election will pit a man of a new generation, with its distinctive history and mind-set, against a man of the old. George Bush will likely be the last U.S. President to have served in World War II. So far, the Clinton campaign has not played the generational card seriously, perhaps because his supporters realize that it isn't a sure-fire trump. Boomers have always been too busy competing with their overly numerous brethren to achieve much solidarity. If you doubt this, go looking for the under-46 equivalent of the American Association of Retired Persons; every attempt to organize such an outfit, including one called Americans for Generational Equity, has fizzled. Moreover, as FORTUNE has noted before (''The Baby-Boomers' Latest Whine,'' January 27), the so-called silent generation who preceded the boomers has hardly rushed to embrace them, turn over the reins of power, or include them in decision-making. For example, until the fairly recent appointment of William P. Barr, 41, as Attorney General, the only boomer in the Bush Cabinet has been J. Danforth Quayle, 45 (but not everybody's idea of a standard-bearer for his generation). In the course of a campaign between a 68-year-old incumbent and a 46-year- old challenger, one can reasonably expect even more valence to build up around Clinton's identity as a baby-boomer, both for and against. This if only because he embodies so many of the generation's salient experiences and characteristics:

-- He comes from a dysfunctional family. Okay, maybe the boomers didn't suffer any more of this than prior generations; the point is that they think they did and have explained their lives accordingly.

For example: If you had to construct the textbook psychobiography of a womanizer, could you do any better than the following? Boy's father dies before son is born. Up until age 4, kid is farmed out to grandparents while mother pursues her education. Mother remarries; husband, a car salesman, turns out to be an alcoholic who abuses her. Son takes stepfather's name anyway. When the boy is 15, the parents divorce. In his youth he has about as many stable fatherly, husbandly adult male figures around as in the Kennedy compound. Mother, an interesting, optimistic woman known to enjoy visits to the race track, ends up marrying five times, to four different men. Through it all, son dotes on mother, seeks to please and protect her. To understand may not be to forgive the man born William Jefferson Blythe IV, but it makes for interesting speculation. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, the theory goes, doesn't necessarily condemn a child to a life of perdition (though Clinton's stepbrother did do prison time for drug dealing). It can also impel a kid toward achievement, toward endeavoring to be perfect in the hope that if he is, maybe the hell at home will calm down. If he grows up trying to play peacemaker, this may fuel a talent for conciliation, or a desire to ingratiate himself, almost no matter what. As in slick.

-- He was morally compromised by the Vietnam war. Except for those who fought or who went to jail in protest, who among us older baby-boom males was not?

-- He now has the almost perfect family. Like many boomers, Bill and Hillary Clinton married comparatively late, in 1975, when he was 29. They have one child, an adored 12-year-old. (By contrast, the Bushes have five children.) Her name is Chelsea -- all right, maybe not as good as Samantha or Heather, but it isn't Mary either. Too bad there's not a little Sean or Brian or Nick to round the kid count toward 2.3, but you can't have everything. Hillary works outside the home -- what else are you going to do if your spouse's salary is $35,000 a year? -- and is arguably brighter and stronger than her husband. But he appears to be able to live with that.

-- He is a careerist. This is one guy who has never failed to ask himself that question central to every baby-boomer facing a choice in life: But how would it look on my resume? Indeed, Clinton may have fallen prey to that still, small voice of boomer hubris -- and potential insecurity -- that whispers, ''You are your resume'': ''Hmmm, I'm Rhodes scholar, Yale Law . . . so what's a little sexual revolution on the side?'' Bill Clinton has been shooting for the top job probably ever since meeting President John F. Kennedy in the early Sixties at Boys' Nation, an exercise in mock government for high schoolers. He has studied the game, networked -- to use the yuppie verb of choice -- relentlessly, and in general done what it took to keep himself in elected office for 13 of the past 15 years.

-- Deep down he still doesn't feel that he's a full-fledged grownup quite yet. That is, if to be a grownup is to have firmly held convictions born of experience, a sure sense of right and wrong, and some serenity about where you fit in the cosmos. We're just guessing here, of course. But for all the time and effort Clinton has devoted to taking counsel with fellow policy wonks -- many of them baby- boomers like professor Robert Reich, 45 -- one still has the occasional sense that he's making it up as he goes along. It may be that Bill Clinton won't figure out what he thinks, at bottom, until he's tested in the crucible of the presidency. In fairness too it should be pointed out that a lack of deeply held beliefs doesn't necessarily disqualify someone from being President. Quick, name one of George Bush's unvarying convictions, other than that capital gains taxes ought to be cut. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. tirelessly -- some might say tiresomely -- propounds the thesis that American politics runs in 30-year cycles. A relatively youthful, idealistic crew sweep into power, vowing to clean up the mess made by their predecessors and to get the nation moving again -- Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning of the century, FDR in the early Thirties, Kennedy in 1960. Then, after some reforms and a few years, the beacon of public service burns a little less brightly. Eventually, in the last decade of the cycle, people run out of civic steam and turn to more private pursuits -- partying, or playing golf, or making money. You get the Roaring Twenties, the Eisenhower years, or the Reagan era. Time for the torch to pass?