Political Prodigy : Leadership: At 25, Nels Henderson is the youngest-ever head of the county Democratic Central Committee. He’s already making changes.

His boyish face and cherubic cheeks force Nels Henderson to avoid unfamiliar bartenders, out of fear that they will demand to see his ID before serving him a beer.

His youthful appearance sometimes raises questions from political activists when they first grasp that he is the chairman of the Ventura County Democratic Central Committee.

“They say, ‘You’re chairman? Aren’t you too young?’ ” Henderson said. “Sometimes it is easy for people not to take me seriously. Once they get to know me, they understand how committed I am.”

At 25, Henderson is the youngest person ever to hold the chairmanship of the county’s Democratic Central Committee. And he loves the attention that he gets as the prodigy politician.

In the past four years, this avowed political junkie has sampled a wide array of political experiences. He has worked for an unsuccessful presidential aspirant, been an aide to state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), run Hart’s low-key reelection campaign in 1990, worked for Santa Barbara County Supervisor Gloria Ochoa and helped Democratic political consultant Mary Rose with a smattering of other campaigns.

His political sights know no bounds at this point in his life. He casually explains how, when he looks older, his political career will carry him to the U.S. Senate.

“I’m not going to run for office until I get gray hair or a few wrinkles,” Henderson said. “I don’t want people looking at my picture and saying, ‘This guy cannot have any experience.’ ”

Like previous chairpersons of the 28-member Democratic Central Committee, Henderson is focused on raising money, registering more Democratic voters and building the party organization.

The Democratic Party has never been particularly powerful in Ventura County, an area dominated by Republicans. And, for the most part, candidates have organized their own campaign machines to get elected and reelected.

But as Henderson sees it, the local Democratic Party will grow in influence as Proposition 140’s term limitations knock incumbents out of office and disperse their campaign organizations.

To prepare for the shift in power, he has infused some youthful energy into the sleepy committee. During his first year in the unpaid position, he dumped two committee members for poor attendance and began coaxing others to show up, with personal notes tucked into agenda packets sent to members.

He has received high marks from his colleagues for attempts to elevate the visibility of the party by co-sponsoring a recent visit by Democratic senatorial candidate Dianne Feinstein and speaking out on political events as the official spokesman of the county’s Democratic Party.

“I admire a guy like Nels,” said Jim Dantona of Simi Valley, a fellow central committee member. “There are not a lot of 25-year-olds who would take the leadership of a committee with members twice and three times his age.”

Henderson, who lives in Oxnard with his fiancee, was not always a Democrat with liberal positions that include supporting abortion rights and opposing the death penalty.

Born into a Republican family in Carmel, he shared his parents’ philosophies as the family moved around the globe to follow his father’s career as an Army officer and a Middle East expert with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.

In his freshman year at Ripon College in Wisconsin, he began to break family political ties. Initially he followed his father’s wishes and signed into the campus’ Reserve Officer Training Corps program, taking classes in sharpshooting and officership.

But one cadet surreptitiously took pictures of him unfurling a banner “U.S. Out of Central America” with another student on campus and turned the evidence over to the ROTC commandant. He quit during a sharp exchange with the commandant about the place of free speech in the Army.

His liberal conversion was completed on the UC Santa Barbara campus when he took a class from sociology professor Dick Flacks, an organizer of Students for a Democratic Society about two decades earlier.

“I took Dick’s class and started looking at things differently,” Henderson said.

In 1986, he walked into the Santa Barbara Democratic Party headquarters and plunged into his assigned tasks of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes. Soon he graduated to planting reelection signs on lawns for Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria).

It was not long before Henderson realized that his calling differed from those of his colleagues in school and his co-workers in after-school jobs.

As a room-service waiter for Santa Barbara’s Biltmore Hotel, Henderson once served a private dinner to actress Morgan Fairchild, her sister and Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston.

“The guys in the kitchen said, ‘Hey, what about Morgan Fairchild? Is she a babe or what?’ I said, ‘Who cares? I got to serve coffee to Sen. Cranston.’ ”

To earn a living, Henderson now splits his time between the Santa Barbara County government’s affirmative action office and its Human Relations Commission.

It’s not a high-wage livelihood, and Henderson often volunteers to tend bar at catered Democratic political events because he cannot afford the suggested contributions.

He confides that he also feels more at ease behind the bar, mixing drinks. It’s one way, he said, to avoid those who scrutinize his face to determine if he has reached legal age.

“I do get carded a lot,” Henderson said. “It’s the baby-faced looks. When I’m 40 and look 30, I’ll be happy about it, I’m sure.”