Her Kerry campaign is not just kid stuff

Sometime between the 2:30 a.m. bedtimes and the crack-of-dawn rises for Fox and ABC appearances, between signing autographs at the FleetCenter and chatting about politics on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," the jet lag caught up with Ilana Wexler.

"She's a little burned out," says Brooke Joseph, a Kerry staffer in San Francisco who jokes she's become Wexler's "handler" this week. "This is all a little bit much at 12 years old."

Wexler, the founder of KidsForKerry.org, says this week has been "surreal." How else could it be for a girl who, with her freckles and unruly red curls, became one of Kerry's most recognizable allies after a convention speech that chastised Vice President Dick Cheney for using a bad word in an exchange with Senator Patrick Leahy?

"If I said that word, I would be put in a timeout. I think he should be put in a timeout," she said Tuesday night, prompting a chant from amused delegates of "Timeout! Timeout!"

Before Teresa Heinz Kerry called last week to ask Wexler to address the convention, the extent of Wexler's public speaking was a short talk at a Kerry fund-raising event in San Francisco and a presentation of an 18-page research paper on India to her sixth-grade class back in Oakland, Calif. A three-minute oration and a good 40 interviews later, Wexler has been handed a much more high-profile podium to plug the platform of her website: getting Kerry in the White House and kids involved in politics.

Like a trouper for her cause, Wexler hauled herself out of bed at her grandmother's apartment in Brighton yesterday morning for yet another reporter -- although she wonders why people still care.

"I'm like, `Aren't I old already? I spoke so long ago,' " she says, legs crossed left over right, left foot bobbing.

Of course, this is coming from someone whose political timeline began a mere three presidential elections ago. Her earliest campaigning began at 10 months, when her parents taped a Clinton poster on the back of her stroller while they handed out Clinton fliers in 1992. Though she accompanied her parents to a Halloween Clinton rally dressed as a pumpkin and to an antiwar protest in 2002, her real political consciousness materialized during a family trip to Latin America and Europe in spring 2003, when the family fielded questions about Iraq on both sides of the Atlantic and she saw graffiti that said "Americans, go home" while in Europe.

"It was so sad to see this, and I knew something had to be done," she says.

After her parents raved about Heinz Kerry after her San Francisco campaign stop last December, Wexler caught Kerry fever. She launched KidsForKerry.org and was asked by Heinz Kerry -- "Teresa" to Wexler -- to speak at a women's campaign event in February. Her March birthday party was covered by the local news as Wexler and 15 friends collected $1,000 for the campaign in less than four hours. Her chocolate birthday cake read, "A vote for Kerry is a vote for kids."

The kids at school have become accustomed to her political zealotry, she says. "Sometimes they think I'm crazy," she says, "because if I'm absent, they know I'm at a Kerry event."

This summer, Wexler is putting in eight-hour days at the San Francisco Kerry headquarters, calling people and acting as the occasional office cookie gofer for a staff still getting used to the newfound fame of its youngest volunteer.

"We were kind of like baby-sitting her, and now she's . . . famous and on talk shows," says Brian Gutterman, a 21-year-old intern.

Wexler will spend August campaigning in swing states with her father, who has taken leave from his work as a freelance CPA to follow her pursuits, which he says have cost upward of $5,000.

It may be a budding career worth funding, as Wexler seems to be a natural at politics. This week she's turned press queries about Bush into a chance to speak about Kerry, and she dismisses Heinz Kerry's "shove it" remark as the result of an "awkward position with a conservative newspaper reporter."

"I saw her earlier that day, and she looked frazzled, like she wasn't having the best day," Wexler says. "It sounds to me that it's not a big deal."

Like most on the campaign trail, Wexler has a one-track mind -- promoting the Kerry campaign. She had to go with her father to get into the R-rated "Fahrenheit 9/11" this summer, and she was excited to spot filmmaker Michael Moore at the convention. So is he her role model?

"No," she says. "Teresa Heinz Kerry is."