Kerry Tries Tapping Youthful Discontent - WSJ

[question everything]

Senator Makes Bid to Win Hearts of Younger Voters as They Turn Against Bush, Iraq War

By DAVID ROGERS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 19, 2004 9:15 a.m.; Page A4

BOSTON -- When Iowa's caucuses launched John Kerry toward the Democratic presidential nomination three months ago tonight, what surprised his rivals most was the support the Massachusetts Democrat won among the record number of young people who turned out to vote and who had been assumed to favor former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

Last week and again yesterday in Miami, Mr. Kerry was back on campuses in a five-state college tour, determined to prove that a wordy, patrician Washington insider can still light a fire under a dot-com generation alienated by politics and not even born when he fought in Vietnam.

"Change Starts with U" is Mr. Kerry's new red-white-and-blue logo, and a flag-draped outdoor rally at the University of Pittsburgh Friday drew thousands to hear the challenger -- and, no doubt, the music of rocker Jon Bon Jovi... It was 33 years ago this week, in fact, that the former Navy officer led a famous Washington antiwar protest with thousands of Vietnam veterans, chanting "Bring our brothers home." Today, rock star Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender" is a campaign anthem; the song's lyrics -- "Like soldiers in the winter's night,...We swore blood brothers against the wind, I'm ready to grow young again" -- evoke Mr. Kerry's youth and a boyhood friend killed in the war.

"It was young people who helped to end the war in Vietnam and young people who created the Clean Air Act," the senator tells students. "All of these things happened because people said, 'We can make a difference.' We need you back. We need you back in this system."

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Issues are clearly a force: no set of voters has swung more with the changing circumstances in Iraq. An October 2002 survey by the Pew Research Center, before the war, found that 18-29-year-olds supported military action by a higher ratio -- 3-to-1 -- than any other age group. Today, the opposite is the case: An April survey found only 40% of 18-29-year-olds favored keeping troops in Iraq until a stable new government is established in Baghdad -- the lowest support of any age range.

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Write to David Rogers at [e-mail]

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[JI7]

1. Kerry did great in GOTV of younger people

among others. the entire campaign did really well there and most didn't see it until the votes actually started coming in. but those who paid attention to what the campaign was doing and especially to the personal reports of what they saw had an idea.