Interesting piece on the NH college kids who are feeling the Bern:
Twenty-three minutes into his typically rambling, hourlong stump speech in the arena here, at a private liberal-arts college on the Massachusetts border—after he had decried the Koch brothers and the prescription-drug companies, after he had accused Wall Street of bribing its way to deregulation, after he had called out the corporate media and the political establishment—Bernie Sanders turned to the bleachers behind him, which were filled with college students waving blue signs and chanting his name.
A sly, unusual smile crossed his face. “I feel like a rock-n-roll star!” he exclaimed, taking off his jacket and tossing it to a startled youth behind him. He pantomimed tearing off his sweater, too, prompting a fresh chant of “Ber-nie! Ber-nie!” Then he grinned sheepishly. “All right, nothing else is coming off,” he said, and continued to the next topic—the sins of Wal-Mart.
The kids are for Bernie.
In Iowa, where Sanders came just a few delegates short of the supposed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, he won a staggering 84 percent of the voters under 30. Just as important, he got them to vote—they made up an unusually large 18 percent of the electorate. A recent New Hampshire poll had him taking 87 percent of the youth vote in the Granite State.
In general, they seem like decent kids who just want a fair shake:
The kids are earnest and well-meaning and sweet. They come to see Sanders in couples, leaning on each other’s shoulder, wearing matching pot-themed T-shirts (“KEEP CALM AND BERN ONE”). They just want everyone’s lives to be better.
“I try to get people to recycle, because I care about what happens to the earth,” said Nicole Rode, a junior biology major, who wishes she could stop having political arguments on Facebook but can’t help herself. “I hate water bottles—it’s just pollution! I don’t identify with a religion. I care about the earth more than anything imaginary.”
I wish we could tap this energy for the state and local elections. That’s the kind of excitement I had (as a distinctly non-kid) for Obama.