HE got his start in politics passing out leaflets for John Kennedy. Four years later he worked to help re-elect Lyndon Johnson. In 1968 he was out on the streets for Robert Kennedy. In this campaign, George McGovern was his man. Working out of shabby walk-up headquarters, he and other McGovern amateurs canvassed Brooklyn's 13th District to saturation, blanketed the neighborhoods from Kings Highway to Coney Island with pamphlets and, on New York's primary day last month, swept into party power, defeating one of New York's more redoubtable Democratic bosses in the process. So this week Kenneth Elstein comes to Miami Beach to collect his delegate's badge and claim a green folding chair at the Democratic National Convention. He is 24 years old.
What is remarkable about Kenneth Elstein is how unremarkable his age was to be in the convention hall. In one of the most fascinatingly improbable assemblages in the history of American politics, the young are everywhere. One survey shows 23% of the delegates under 30 (v. only 2.6% in 1968), and McGovern estimates that nearly 500 of his are in that category. Elstein is thus a symbol of an astonishing new force in the Democratic Party: the young politicians come of age. It is a force that may save—or sunder—the Democrats. It may galvanize the election—or the defeat—of George McGovern. It contains the potential for a struggle that may make the issue at Miami Beach even larger than the selection of a candidate. What is at stake is the Democratic Party's future and its political soul.
The battle lines are clearly drawn. The McGovern young can argue with considerable justice that America's alienated youth were invited to work within the system, and (BAM! POW! SPLAT!) they did. Armed with the reform rules that McGovern helped to formulate, the young legions this year shattered political assumptions and shut down party machines that had been grinding on for decades. Through New Hampshire's bitter months, through the endlessly tedious precinct caucuses and state conventions, they mimeographed and telephoned and pounded door to door, living on peanut butter and jelly and spending their nights in sleeping bags on someone else's living-room floor. Their numbers grew with success; duty became dream became destiny; the impossible turned possible turned probable. Often with scant direction or help from the candidate himself, they built from the ground up the best political organization in the U.S. today.