'Kid for Kerry' is pondering 2008 role

Ilana Wexler has a dilemma. The Hillary Clinton for President campaign wants her to chair its Students for Hillary committee. At the same time, several of her friends are stumping for Barack Obama and want her to join their team. But if Wexler, 15, has her way, Al Gore will declare his candidacy, and she'll endorse him.

It figures that Clinton et al would covet the Ilana Factor: Three years ago, she was a plucky 12-year-old who started a grassroots organization called Kids for Kerry and addressed the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Sporting a crown of curly red hair and an effervescent smile, Wexler became an instant celebrity during the three-minute speech that followed Obama's historic keynote address. Now, she's in demand again, an indication of how politicians are seeking support from the 76 million Millennials, as the generation born between 1980 and 2000 is called -- even when, like Wexler, they are too young to vote.

"My goal was to get younger children -- my age -- aware about politics," she said. "I was very passionate about it."

Wexler is a freshman at Berkeley High, where she takes classes in the communications arts and sciences division. She still has the glow and enthusiasm she exuded at the July 2004 convention, still thinks politics are thrilling and still tends to gush when she talks. Health care and education, she said, are the big issues she would push if she were an elected official.

Three years is a huge span in the life of a teenager. You get taller, you get self-conscious. You often feel embarrassed by the memory of who you were a year or two before. When Wexler spoke at the 2004 convention, she said, "I think I was considered cute. Now that I'm older, I would actually hope that people would listen to me even more because they'll think older people have more sense."

Seeing Kerry lose in November 2004 was crushing. She'd worked 10 months on his campaign, sacrificed summer camp to long days at Kerry's Oakland campaign headquarters and says she enjoyed a strong personal connection with the candidate's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. It was Heinz Kerry, in fact, who phoned Ilana at home ("I was eating pancakes with my brother") and personally extended the invitation to speak at the convention.

After the defeat, she said, "I was depressed for at least a year. ... I still went on, but I was depressed because all those wonderful experiences were gone. And also the wonderful experiences I was looking forward to, like going to the White House, and staying in touch with John Kerry."

Wexler is speaking in the living room of the East Bay home she shares with her dad, Jonathan, a certified public accountant; her mom, Heidi, a drama therapist who works with Asperger syndrome teenagers at Skyline High in Oakland; and her brother, Mori, an 11-year-old rock-music fanatic who plays electric guitar.

The house is big, paneled in dark wood and has a cheerful sense of kid-friendly clutter. Three bicycles hang from hooks in the hallway. Ilana's rowing machine and Mori's guitar share a corner of the upstairs living room. There's a funky, informal, post-hippie vibe: random collections of peacock feathers, ethnic art pieces from the Central American countries the Wexlers visited on an extended 2005 vacation.

The family is unusually tight. Ilana hugs her brother when she gets home from school, brags about his musical talent and still snuggles with him the way she did when he was a toddler. "We're very closely bonded," her mom said. "That's what we wanted. And that's what makes Ilana comfortable to go out in the world (and do political volunteering), is knowing she can come back home and have a very close-knit family."

In 2005, Ilana had her bat mitzvah, traveled overseas with her parents and attended the Junior National Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., where she didn't mind that most of the enrollees were Republican. "I was still friends with them."

Wexler hopes to work the 2008 presidential election and said if she's asked again to speak at the convention, "I could go on forever."

Passion for politics is unusual in a 15-year-old, but in lots of ways, Ilana said, she's typical for her age. She loves to watch "Desperate Housewives" and likes to listen to the Fray and singers Lily Allen and KT Tunstall. For a while, her grades were slipping, but now that she's not hooked on instant-messaging her friends, she said, she's managing to hold a 4.0 grade point average.

The Wexlers don't want their city of residence identified in this article -- a caution they've had to take since Ilana became a target of online harassment. After she spoke at the convention, her father says, "There was this ultra-conservative group that listed our home address on their Web site. All day long we would get (computer) viruses sent to us."

It got worse. "People would write to the Kids for Kerry Web site saying, " 'Ilana, I know you support John Kerry. But do you know he tries to promote the murder of children? He's for abortion.' It was crazy. This was a 12-year-old girl they were doing this to."

Neither of Ilana's parents encouraged her political activism, she said. "I think they were always very aware and they always vote in every election. But I'm a curious person. I like to figure out what everyone's doing and what's going on in the news. So, I think that curiosity really spiked my interest in politics, most definitely."

"What really spurred Ilana's interest in politics was our family trips," said her father. "The first was in March 2003, the same month American forces invaded Iraq. We went to Guatemala and Belize and Costa Rica, then Holland and France, Italy and Prague and Budapest. Every place we went, people were very kind to us. At the time not many Americans were traveling, and people would say, 'What do you think of your president?' That really sparked her interest and made her think, 'Is there something wrong?' "