The Dems' Really Young Guns
By Laura Fitzpatrick
David Gilbert-Pederson does a pretty good impression of a grizzled old pol. A delegate from Minneapolis and full-time Barack Obama field worker, he's on his fifth campaign, having cut his teeth working for Walter Mondale's brief Senate run back in 2002. Although he's on constant alert for surprise swift-boat-style attacks from the right, Gilbert-Pederson reports that Obama's operation is "one of the best that I've ever seen in a presidential race."
There's just one thing about him that doesn't fit the hard-boiled, seen-it-all image: Gilbert-Pederson isn't yet old enough to vote. At 17, he will be the youngest Democratic delegate in Denver--and one of several hundred millennials who will descend on a convention that boasts the most 36-and-under delegates in decades.
The children's crusade harks back--about 40 years back. In 1969, a few years before young voters embraced his presidential campaign, George McGovern spearheaded a rule that women, minorities and young people should be seated at the convention in proportion to their share of the population. It sounded great at the time, but for the next several decades, young voters didn't turn out in any numbers that their population share might have suggested. (McGovern got creamed.) That could change this year. Obama has energized millions of voters age 36 and under, who seem to be organizing entire states via text messages.
Some of the most excited of these newcomers are, like Gilbert-Pederson, the very youngest. Homeschooled since ninth grade, mostly so he could spend more time campaigning, Gilbert-Pederson in 2006 started a Minneapolis branch of the Hip Hop Caucus, a voter-outreach group for young progressives. Touting the group in 2007 to dozens of cheering onlookers, he tried to quote Obama's 2004 DNC speech from memory, then ended with a call for canvassing: "Lend me your hands, lend me your ears, lend me your feet. We're gonna walk, we're gonna knock, we're gonna talk."
Since June, Gilbert-Pederson has been taking his own advice, making phone calls and going door-to-door for Obama in Minnesota, Iowa and New Hampshire. Balancing his social life and campaigning is a challenge, he says. At the convention, he hopes that e-mailing his constituents--those would include his parents, friends and the donors sending him to Denver--will "maintain my sanity."
Other young Denver delegates will also be busy keeping their networks linked in. Jason Rae, 21, of Rice Lake, Wis.--the party's youngest superdelegate, a co-chairman of the DNC Youth Council and a political-science student at Marquette University--says he has promised to call friends from the floor to "keep them in the process." It's the young wonk's version of holding up a cell phone at a rock concert so a far-away fan can listen.
Sean Stimmel, 19, a delegate from Los Alamos, N.M., will miss the first three days of his sophomore year at New Mexico Tech to blog from Denver for friends and donors. A year ago, Stimmel never read political news, but after a neighbor pushed him to volunteer for Obama, he is flirting with a political career of his own someday. Like Stimmel, Gilbert-Pederson says reaching other young voters will be key to an Obama victory. And when the convention and campaign are over? "On to adult life, I guess," he says.