After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Suffer the little children
Skye Stolnitz of Los Angeles is a patron of Republican presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander; Asher Simon pumped big money into Sen. Diane Feinstein's re-election campaign; Lindsey Tobak topped them both, donating $20,000 in "soft money" to the Democratic Party.
Why are these political donors unusual in today's Big Money politics? They're too young to drive, order a beer or vote—just 10, 9 and 15 years old when they became contributors. The law imposes no age limit on contributors, so parents have begun to tap their children to skirt the legal limit of $1,000 that any individual can give to a particular candidate.
Skye's dad says his 10-year-old daughter's $1,000 contribution to Alexander came from her own checking account, and that when he told her about it "she did not object." Since 1991, children have "not objected" to their parents raiding their piggy banks to the tune of $7.5 million in contributions. So far, the junior league champ is Bradford Bainum, who gave $2,000 to candidates before he was two years old.
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