The Youngest Delegate Speaks

Sunday, August 13 -- We made Thomas Santaniello famous.

Not that he wouldn't have, in time, become famous in his own right, but tonight, between bites of caviar and blue cheese on new potatoes and vegetable kabobs dripping with butter, we have brought him the first flurry of media attention in his emerging political career. Because Santaniello -- at age 17 the youngest delegate to attend the Democratic National Convention 2000, the youngest attendee at the Young Democrats of America's Knitting Factory shindig -- is the only delegate who came close enough to be mobbed.

"Is this the first time you've been jumped by the media?" we ask Santaniello as not just three reporters swarm this lone, newbie delegate -- three-on-one being the convention's official journalist-to-delegate ratio -- but seven, two with cameras. Santaniello, fresh out of Spartanburg, South Carolina, wearing a suit and tie and a wide-eyed expression, his short brown hair neatly Brylcreamed to the side, barely knows what to say.

"It is!" he beams. "It is! It's a madhouse! It's crazy! I can't believe it!"

The convoy of cop cars screaming up Highland Avenue, along with the Fort Knox security in force at the newest Hollywood hotspot, might have clued us in that we would not be attending a typical delegate party, the kind at which delegates are the most honored guests. Instead, YDA has the honor of hosting not only Bill Clinton, but Al Gore and his daughters, Kristin and Karenna Gore-Schiff. The press, like guilty plotters in a failed coup attempt, have been hustled by a pert but panicked blonde through back hallways and up stairwells, and herded without much ceremony into a cramped media pit overlooking the club's dance floor. Once behind the tape in our 15-by-6-foot corral, our quarantine became complete: Even our cell phones had been rendered inert by microwave transmitters.

We did, however, manage to score two drink tickets apiece before the lockdown, and a young woman with close-cropped curls and a smart-aleck attitude was happy to cash them in for us. "Drink a lot," she advised. "You're trapped."

The YDA is the training ground for the party's activists and the farm team for tomorrow's Clintons and Gores, an organization in which ideals and ambitions easily coexist. From our crowded confines, we had summoned one of their legion, Evelyn Jerome, president of the L.A. County Young Democrats, and begged her to bring us a delegate, any delegate. Moments later she returned -- "Am I quick or what?" -- with Santaniello in tow. And suddenly Santaniello is verging on celebrity, glowing under the glare of video-camera lights, energetically shouting replies to reporters' questions over the din of music and partiers. Repeatedly, reporters demand to know how a 17-year-old qualifies to be a delegate. And Santaniello consistently obliges to answer. "I'll be 18 on August 28," he announces. "Because I can vote in November, I get to be a delegate."

"And how did you get so interested in politics?"

"It was really just the '96 election and all the media coverage that did it," he says. "You guys did a good job." From another delegate, such a remark might sound shrewd. It is perhaps a sign of Santaniello's youth that he means it.

If Santaniello seems unbelievably young to carry the weight of being a voting delegate at a national political convention, consider that he's been campaigning since the eighth grade, when he first entered the beltway of student government. Later, at James F. Burns High School, he formed a nonpartisan organization devoted to involving teenagers in state government. "I organized a voter-registration drive and registered 150 seniors to vote," he says. "We brought the voter drive to them, and what we found was not apathy, but people being enthusiastic to vote for the first time." Santaniello didn't exactly attempt to sell his schoolmates on the Democratic Party, but encouraged them to "take a serious look at the candidates and get out and vote. But of course," he admits, "I try to steer them in my direction."