Two unrelated items:
1. This young marine and adopted New Yorker is just a wonderful writer. Read it.
2. I watched Howard Dean’s speech at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Dinner last night (right after they auctioned off Tom Harkin’s tie and passed around buckets to raise money–politics is so unbelievably hokey sometimes.) It was a slightly modified, well delivered stump speech but what caught my attention was this: Dean said that 25% of the donations to his campaign were from voters under 30.
I assume he must have been referring to the number of donors, not the dollar amount. Even so, that sounds unusual, and impressive. Some people may see this as yet more evidence that he’s the Return of McGovern. But it seems to me that you have to be pretty paranoid to decide it’s a bad thing to excite people who are usually so apathetic.
I also noticed and was impressed by Dean’s comment. Maybe he really is bringing new people into the political process.