"Delegates are not the noblest sons and daughters of the Republic; a man of taste, arrived from Mars, would take one look at a convention floor and leave forever, convinced he had seen one of the drearier squats of Hell."
That's Norman Mailer from his famous Esquire essay on the 1960 convention "Superman Comes to the Supermarket."
The two young men in this delegate diary aren't the the practitioners of small town political judo sweating out the low levels of the political machine. In the long shadow of Lyndon Johnson's machine, they're the new new Texas democrats inspired by Howard Dean and his Internet movement and they want to have a voice. These young men are earnest and thoughtful; I wondered though as I read Mailer on Kennedy: "...in fact it is a mystery to the boss how Kennedy got to where he is, not a mystery in its structures; Kennedy is rolling in money, Kennedy got the votes in primaries, and, most of all, Kennedy has a jewel of a political machine. It is as good as a crack Notre Dame team, all discipline and savvy and go-go-go, sound, drilled, never dull, quick as a knife, full of the salt of hipper-dipper, a beautiful machine; the boss could adore it if only a sensible candidate were driving it..." whether Kerry is the man this generation is pining for.