Campus Politics At Odds With Outside World

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

(UWIRE)  Finding a way to make up ground on Clinton has at times proved especially challenging for the Obama campaign, when you consider that the two candidates have virtually the same policy talking points. Clinton’s campaign has encountered a similar difficulty in defining her own presidential identity; rather than butting heads on policy, each has argued for more generalized character traits, with Obama being shaped as the unifying savior outside Washington politics, and Clinton, the experienced warrior. Gants insists that Obama is the “answer to reshaping government,” and that Clinton is “too divisive.”

It is precisely this “divisive” image that Yale Students for Hillary is seeking to change; its members say their goal is to reverse the flash-over-flavor phenomenon, and turn the normal college student approach on its head. Co-president Ben Stango identifies the group’s primary focus as educating Yale students about who Clinton is and what her policies are. Stango refers to “these people who don’t like her and when asked why, can’t come up with a real answer besides her manner.” He notes that “negative opinions of her don’t come from votes that she’s made or policy positions.” Yale Students for Hillary will focus primarily on the Yale community in the coming weeks, canvassing first in dorms and then hopefully expanding to the greater New Haven area and then move to the early primary states.

The youth vote paradox is not only manifest in the early Democratic race, but is rearing its head in Republican student interest as well. The strangest and most unusual symptom of the gulf between national preference and the youth movement? Fringe Republican candidate Ron Paul.

Paul is a tenth-term Congressman from Texas and ran as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president in 1988. Despite being 72 years old, Paul is the most “friended” Republican candidate on MySpace and has surpassed even Barack Obama in YouTube subscribers. He is polling nationally at less than 5 percent according to the most recent data, but still has somehow commanded young individuals’ interests, amidst greater national Republican preference for Guliani, former Tenessee Senator Fred Thompson, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and Arizona Senator John McCain.

“I think it’s kind of a fetish,” said Giuliani supporter Sudipta Bandyopadhyay on the popularity of Ron Paul among college students.

Unlike Obama - certainly a credible threat to Clinton’s large lead - Paul’s candidacy is likely futile, but still enjoys greater popularity among college students than the general population. There are still certain similarities, in that both Obama and Paul are “outsider” candidates in their respective parties - Obama as the anti-establishment foil to Clinton and Paul by virtue of his libertarian ideas. Paul’s agenda “appeals to lots of people on the left and on the right,” according to Johnston, finding support outside of the mainstream Republican Party just as Obama has found support among independents. Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate to have actively opposed the war in Iraq from the start, mirroring Obama’s 2002 stance.

Like Obama’s ability to, according to Gants, “change the way we do politics in America,” Paul’s radical policy proposals similarly promise a fundamental change in the way government works (they include abolishing the Department of Education in order to reduce the size of government). When Lazarus said that the reason Paul “resonates with college students is that he promises real change,” it takes a moment to realize which candidate he’s describing.

But that is where their similarities end. The irony of Paul’s popularity among the Facebooking generation is that he may not even know what YouTube or MySpace is. Unlike Obama, nobody is claiming that Paul is cool or hip; the closest Ron Paul comes to that realm is being mistaken for rapper Sean Paul.

Despite the national Ron Paul craze, Yale’s Republicans still tend to gravitate toward the mainstream favorites. Johnston spent the summer working at Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters but decided against forming a Yale for Romney group, since there are comparatively few people on campus who are Republicans, and even those few disagree about the candidates.

That hasn’t stopped the formation of a Yale chapter of Students for Giuliani (a national organization). The group kicked off by participating in Giuliani’s National House Party night, where a group of Giuliani supporters watched him speak via live webcam. Matt Klein, a Giuliani supporter, is not dissuaded by the relatively small percentage of Republicans on campus, since “a little over 10 percent of students self-identify as conservative…there’s a lot of potential for a significant amount of support, although maybe not the size of Yale for Obama or the Democrats.” None of the members of Students for Giuliani would speak on the record as affiliated with the campaign.

During the course of Obama’s speech in Washington Square Park, the sun set over the low apartment buildings and trees. The Obama campaign’s official graphic decorating signs and bumper stickers is a rising sun within the O of his name. And the darkening light during the speech cast an ironic and ominous metaphorical shade onto Obama’s hope-heavy rhetoric. But the senator from Illinois kept pumping his fist and the crowd of students kept shouting excitedly.

The youth fever is real, extending beyond Washington Square Park trees. Obama has cast a spell over college students, but in the end, it may not be enough.

Gants acknowleges that the Obama campaign faces an uphill battle since “it’s tougher to convince older voters that real change is possible because they’ve seen politicians come and go, but that’s why we need young voters to…show everyone that a real transformation of American politics is possible.” Still, Fineman warns, “This is the baby boomer generation, and it doesn’t give up power easily or willingly. You’re gonna have to rip it from our cold lifeless fingers.”