Fiscal Scolds: The Next Generation

Cash prizes, a date with Bill Clinton: Pete Peterson recruits collegiate centrists 

BY ALEC MACGILLIS

oung Republicans and College Democrats have their perks—the occasional trip to a state party convention, maybe—but they can’t hope to compete with young centrists. When a dozen college students came to St. Louis recently as part of a competition funded by the 85-year-old billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson, they were put up in the Ritz-Carlton, while the hundreds of other students attending the same conference stayed in humbler quarters. “Once Peterson opens the money faucet, it’s hard for him to close it,” joked one of the lucky ones, University of Texas business student Hamid Poorsafar.

The students had not sought out such luxury. They had simply responded to a call that came across campus list-serves last year—a new contest, funded by the Peterson Foundation and dubbed Up to Us, under which students from 10 colleges would devise ways to “educate and engage” their classmates about the national debt and the threat it poses to their generation. The prize for the team with the most effective proselytizing: $10,000 and the chance to attend Clinton Global Initiative University, the annual youth-oriented counterpart to the former president’s huge philanthropic confab for grown-ups.