Grooming the Next Crop of Political Aspirants

Surely Erin Ross wasn’t the only child in America who determined at age 7 that she would grow up to be president.

But as Ross went through public schools in Palos Verdes and enrolled at Tufts University here, she began to wonder.

Studies showed that almost 90% of her age group--the 18- to 24-year-old pack known as the Millennials--said volunteering in the community was more productive than taking part in politics. An overwhelming majority distrusted the federal government and said politicians were motivated only by selfishness. And in the last general election, only about one-third of her peers bothered to vote.

Never one to be daunted by statistics, Ross sat down with her friends Larry Harris and Jesse Levey and dreamed up the United Leaders’ Institute for Political Service. By this summer, just six months after Harris scribbled out a mission statement on scratch paper, the program sponsored jointly by Tufts and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government was up and running.

“We see this as the beginning of our effort to combat the system and to change the system,” said Ross, 21, one of the program’s 12 undergraduate fellows from colleges across the country.

“It’s a movement,” said Harris, 22 and an aspiring attorney general. “We’re trying to equip this movement with the foot soldiers who are going to go into elective office.”

With a budget of $100,000, Levey, Harris and Ross launched an eight-week program offering summer internships at political and nonprofit offices in Boston. They devised regular academic seminars and dinner meetings with politicians, activists and authors. Saturdays were set aside for community service, and on Sunday nights the group gathered for debates.

“It’s been very rigorous,” said fellow Alethea Pieters, a 20-year-old Tufts senior from Houston.

Pieters, who divided her internship between a U.S. Senate candidate and the Boston office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), said she started the program with her sights on a U.S. Supreme Court seat. But the summer’s speakers and seminars shifted her toward “the real stuff, elected politics”--specifically, the U.S. Senate.

From a national applicant pool of about 90, 12 student fellows can hardly be expected to produce an undergraduate groundswell. But Cathy McLaughlin, director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, predicted a rapid ripple effect.

“You have to start small,” McLaughlin said. “You can’t grow until you know what works and what doesn’t work. These kids are really doing this the right way, stopping to look at their program and evaluate it.”

Most important, she said, they are sticking to their message “that getting young people involved in politics is important and that they have to get involved in the process in order to make it work.”

Laying a Foundation

Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, a Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, said he was “blown away” when he spoke at a recent United Leaders forum.

“These kids make my generation look passive by comparison,” Dukakis said.

Even with just a dozen fellows, he said, “well, they are going to have another dozen next year and then another and another, and they will all start connecting, and pretty soon you’ve got this network.”

To Dukakis, this is heartening, for as he regularly tells his students, “There is nothing like public service. It is the most personally fulfilling and satisfying thing you can do in this world.”

Levey, 21, said he shared that view, even as the presidential impeachment hearings were raging during his freshman year at Tufts. “It was a real time of upheaval in government,” said the native San Franciscan, who hopes to be governor of California. “I saw people around me becoming increasingly turned off by the partisanship in politics.”

At Tufts, he discovered that the largest campus organization was a volunteer organization. Serving on the student government with Harris and Ross, Levey said, “what we thought is, if we could connect this service movement with politics, we could somehow make a difference.”

Researching the possibilities, the three settled on two primary reasons their age group avoids politics.

“One, they don’t see politics as a vehicle for social change,” Levey said. “Second, especially at the entry level, there are just too many financial burdens.”

Politics is seldom lucrative, he explained, and many in his generation have high salary expectations. He admits it sounds idealistic, but one of the organization’s goals is to demonstrate that public service is its own form of remuneration.

Antidote to Apathy

Harris, the fellowship program’s chief executive, called the conundrum “a cycle where politicians aren’t reaching out to young people, and young people aren’t interested in politics.”

As one immediate antidote to this dilemma, he installed young political figures on the program’s board of directors, such as Rep. Adam H. Putnam (R-Fla.), 26, who is the youngest member of Congress.

Because of her political ambitions, Ross said she has met with criticism and cynicism throughout her life. “People say, you want to do what?” she said.

With Harris and Levey, she intends to stay with United Leaders as it expands beyond Boston--first to Washington, then to California, they hope.

And yes, she does still expect to be president one day.

Although, she said, “I may be a little more realistic about it now than I was in second grade.”