Howard Dean's Youth Machine

[Khephra]

Not since the '70s has a presidential candidate enamored so many young voters


Gray Brooks is a young Southern gentleman from Alabama, the kind who says "yessir" and "no sir" and attends a small Christian college. One day last May he drove the 1,244 miles to presidential candidate Howard Dean's headquarters in Burlington, Vermont and deposited himself, uninvited, on the doorstep at 9 a.m. Soon he was working seven days a week, sometimes until 1:30 a.m., sleeping on the floor of a room with five other equally dedicated college volunteers. They did take one vacation recently - a weekend trip to Lake Placid, New York, to hear Dean speak. "It doesn't seem fanatic to me," Brooks says. "I really do want Howard Dean to be president, and it just seems logical to me to try as hard as you can. A lot of people feel that way." He's not exaggerating. Howard Dean first inspired shock and awe among Washington insiders by raising more than $7 million and by pulling within striking distance of John Kerry in New Hampshire and Dick Gephardt in Iowa. But for all the stories about Dean's extraordinary success in attracting supporters via the Internet, an even more consequential development has been less noticed: the extraordinary number of Dean volunteers on the ground, the lion's share of them young. By spring Dean had organizations in all 50 states, remarkable at this early date in the process; what's even more remarkable is that Dean headquarters had about as much to do with building this network as it did with recruiting Gray Brooks. When Dean's official campaign organization, Dean for America, opened its door with six staffers and $157,000 in the bank last winter, organizers knew that they would have to tap the grassroots to have any hope of being taken seriously. "We just didn't know how we were going to do it," remembers campaign manager Joe Trippi. He didn't realize it was already being done - by students. Earlier this year, two D.C.-area college kids, Michael Whitney and Ari Mittleman, heard Dean speak and, two weeks later, put up the first Dean student Web site. By that date, students from dozens of colleges and universities had launched 10 pro-Dean groups; before March was out, they had started a national organization, Students for Dean, with 30 campus chapters. By early July, Students for Dean had 184 chapters, all working without any official connection to the Dean campaign. As many as a third of their coordinators had never done anything political before in their lives. Now Dean has his grassroots army, and the campaign's playing it for all it's worth. "They want to work 18, 20 hours a day," Trippi says of the young interns Dean has attracted to Burlington. And it's blowing Trippi's mind. "As somebody who's been through seven presidential campaigns" - beginning, in 1980, with Ted Kennedy - "I feel like I'm in my first one."

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http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10003246&BRD=2318&PAG=461&dept_id=484045&rfi=6

[Cha]

1. Interesting! It's blowing my mind, too! To be so involved in

a real "grassroots" campaign like I always wanted to be since I first heard about it in 2000! :kick:

[DrFunkenstein]

2. Drop A Buck Down

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