this morning's paper

Zachary Goldfarb writes, in "Sunday Politics," about John Edwards' and Rick Santorum's use of text messaging to communicate with supporters. Apparently the response rates are pretty good relative to email. Text messages and email, as far as I can tell, are two sides of a generational divide, although Goldfarb doesn't mention this. Young people, according to a (relatively) recent Pew study, think email is for old people but spend insane amounts of time texting. Anyway, this doesn't seem like a particularly new idea. Weren't campaigns doing this as far back as 2002?

There's an interesting video on The Washington Post site about a Mexican version of Rock the Vote. The youth population in Mexico is pretty substantial -- 40 percent -- so it makes sense to mobilize them to vote. But the campaign looks like what Rock the Vote was doing in 1992 and, despite the fact that the youth vote went up that year, it wasn't because of Rock the Vote, it was due to a guy you might have heard of -- Bill Clinton.

On the topic of another Clinton, James Carville and Mark Penn have an op-ed in today's Post that makes it clear that the chatter about Hillary being unelectable in 2008 is a load of crap. They haven't convinced me yet, but they obviously have some cred on the topic, so I'll keep it in mind.