It's not easy to wear a label. Too many issues crisscross the lines between liberal and conservative. As in most big families, we're squabbling with each other and challenging Papa Bush and fighting with Mommy Pelosi. Their advisers and consultants are fuming about how to "turn out the base," but it's not clear anymore just what "the base" means.

Peggy Noonan, the scribe for the Reagan Revolution, questions the meaning of the term everyone is talking about. "Nobody sees himself as the base," she observes in The Wall Street Journal. "They see themselves as individuals. And they're not dumb. . . . They know when you're trying to manipulate them."

Camille Paglia, the maverick of arts and letters who describes herself as a Democrat but not a Bush hater, pinpoints the flaw in what the pollsters call her "cohort." She blames the culture of dumbness wrought by liberal professors on campus and encouraged in real life.

"My generation of baby-boom Democrats hasn't done much thinking about international issues except in terms of postmodernist fragmentation or fuzzy, smiley-face multiculturalism," she tells Salon magazine. "We desperately need better candidates." She's particularly hard on baby boomer Bill Clinton, "a compulsive blabbermouth who is compromising his own dignity as a former president. . . . Why is Clinton undermining the authority of the president when national security is so sensitive?" It's too late for Hillary to dump him, but if she were to become president we'd really be in trouble, saddled with a dangerous co-presidency.

If the boomers don't understand the rules of the world where they live, the generation of voters in college today knows even less. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently tested 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges with 60 questions on American history, government, market economies and U.S. foreign policy. The average "civic literacy" score for seniors was 53.2 percent, for freshman 54.7 percent. Failing grades all.

The longer a student attends class, the dumber he gets. Students at the elite schools fared worse than students at some church and land-grant schools. The Ivy League school whose students ranked highest were those at Princeton, at No. 18. Harvard's students were 25th. The lowest scores were posted at such bastions of higher learning as Cornell, University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. Go figure, as some unhappy parents will no doubt do.

But there's a voting cohort between Generation Xers and boomers that bears watching. They're the not-so-young Generation Jones. If they're not "the lost generation," they're invisible to most of our culture commentators.