Howard Dean's Youth Machine

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.

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."

For over 20 years, the Democratic Party has worked successfully to structure the nominating system to give the advantage to the "safest" candidate as early as possible in the process. The current system -- a direct response to George McGovern's youth-centered, but disastrous, general election campaign against Richard Nixon in 1972 -- has brought some remarkable political successes, but at the price of stripping the party of the qualities associated with youth at its best: intensity, energy, commitment, momentum.

There are plenty of the starry-eyed idealists among the Students for Dean, to be sure: they sign their e-mails with nostrums that sound like ?70s dorm room posters. But they are also focused, savvy, and, more often then not, moderate. Maya Herman, chapter head at the University of Chicago, was first attracted by the effect she fears Bush's growing budget deficits could have "on our children and grandchildren" (Dean is a deficit hawk). Gray Brooks's presidential second choice is Gen. Wesley Clark. The thing that seems to keep the ideologically diverse organizers remarkably peaceful is a shared sense that, in a low and dishonest era, they have found in Howard Dean an honest man.

Dean can win the general election, they claim, and as they make their case they often sound like veteran political operatives: Keith Causin, an organizer at Queens College, complains about Democrats who bemoan Republican marketing savvy "rather than trying to counter with good three-word catch phrases" of their own. Link-Gellis, a former civil-liberties organizer, even extends Dean a pass on his NRA-approved gun control positions as one of the things that "would win big points with people in the South." Asserts Causin: "Once Dean really starts campaigning, people are going to see that he's not this kind of weird radical lefty, that he's actually quite an effective campaigner. A moderate voice."

In Texas, this has not been a particularly youthful campaign. Instead it is a great mix of all ages.