Campus Politics At Odds With Outside World

The Yale Herald: Students Tend To Flock To Candidates Who Aren't Front-Runners

(UWIRE)  Interestingly, none of these reasons have to do with Obama’s policy positions, which are lined up almost perfectly with those of Clinton. When asked why Obama appeals to young people, Gants replied with abstract terms: “I think young people especially college students gravitate towards authenticity.”

Fineman is skeptical of such claims and cites basic adult needs and practicalities as the most likely reason for the tragic archetype of the hip and popular Democratic candidate. “The young person’s favorite candidate simply doesn’t hinge on substance; it’s about style and flash,” said Fineman. “All of these words like freshness, change, and a new way of politics outside the system - the young population is entitled to think big like that; grand designs and conceptual theorizing is a privilege when you’re a college student. Meanwhile,” Fineman continues, “your parents need to pay the bills, worry about Social Security, and choose medical insurance. They’re not quite so eager to see the whole system be put on blocks and retooled.” For Fineman, the current Baby Boomer adults are like the students in a residential college needing renovation. Even if the system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, they’d like to not suffer through the construction on their watch.

The gaping chasm dividing national success from youth preference is perhaps one of many possible reasons for growing student apathy and disillusionment with politics. For America’s youth, watching its chosen candidates fall in the nomination process four elections in a row is deflating. One can’t help but suspect that many originally active political students feel the burden of apparent futility. Certainly when compared with our parents’ adolescence, - which included Vietnam, the draft, and the general 1960’s baby boomer activism - ours is an age of cooled student political activity, and begs the question: Can we still have an effect?

Perhaps another possible reason for the general decline of young activism is the nature of the modern grass-roots campaign itself, and the student’s place in it. Greg Geusic, policy director of the Yale chapter of the Roosevelt Institution, has mixed feelings about presidential campaigning by students. Having spent part of the 2004 election canvassing and phone banking for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, Geusic embodies that feeling of apathetic weariness of student political volunteering. “It’s really easy to get discouraged because it’s tedious and boring. You can be replaced by any other person…because you’re just a body,” Geusic said. “I think that students are potentially very passionate and can bring a lot to politics, but campaigns don’t really take advantage of that. I think that’s why students have grown sort of disillusioned.”

Peter Johnston, a Republican, agrees, preferring discussion to canvassing. According to Johnston, most conservatives’ political activity at Yale is “primarily intellectual and not activist. Doing volunteer work for a candidate is just not as interesting or exciting as debating the various issues.” For Geusic, the cultural upheaval and generational rebellion of our parents’ time gave students an outlet for their ideas, unlike now. “Vietnam and the draft clearly was a different situation, but the rallies and protests gave students a vehicle and medium for expressing real and thoughtful ideas. That old-fashioned activism is about saying ‘these are my ideas’ and using your body to fight for your beliefs,” Geusic said. “Whereas when you’re working for a campaign now, it’s the ideas of the least bad candidate that you pick.”

Adam Goodrum, founder of Yale for Edwards, disagrees with Geusic’s assessment, suggesting that true supporters should be willing to do what he acknowledges “aren’t the most glamorous aspects of the campaign. If Edwards supporters at Yale want to put their money where their mouth is, it’s really important that they get involved any way they can.”

Yale for Obama is also not too discouraged with their role. The group has tried to capitalize on its wide support by organizing its first canvassing trip to New Hampshire, an early primary state, on Sept. 29, and sees it as an opportunity to have a concrete impact on the primaries.

There is, however, arguably a vacuum of substance at both ends of the student-candidate relationship. Both in the mechanical chores that have come to characterize students’ sole activities campaigning, and the displacement of candidates’ policy for style and flash, the substantive exchange of ideas is absent. Geusic is critical of what he sees “as both Obama’s and Hillary’s campaigns, running much more on image than on policy”, with Clinton being actively portrayed by her campaign as the inheritor of the presidency and “sort of inevitable” primary winner and Obama as the “new hope to disillusioned voters.”

There’s no doubt, said Fineman, that youth is consistently attracted to “sizzle, appearance, and marketed image, over real material matter. Looking at Hillary next to Obama,” Fineman muses, “is like checking out an old clunky cell phone from fifteen years ago next to a nifty looking miniature one. You’re not too interested in how well the phone actually works; it’s whether it looks cool.”