March 24, 2008
Carnegie Mellon Students Notice There's an Election
Exactly how big a deal is this year’s presidential election on college campuses? Well, it’s getting so big that students at Carnegie Mellon University are actually paying attention.
It was only a few years ago that Princeton Review, the test-preparation company famous for its annual rankings, rated Carnegie Mellon as the most politically apathetic college or university in the nation. Now, with the Democratic race still unsettled and Pennsylvania scheduled to vote next on April 22, things are changing.
This past weekend, a group supporting Barack Obama ran a voter-registration operation at the Greek Sing, an annual musical event sponsored by the university’s fraternities and sororities. Organizers told The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon’s student newspaper, that they’ve registered several hundred new voters in the past two weeks alone.
And in a typically Carnegie Mellon response to the election campaign, Bryant Lee, a graduate student in computer science, has created a Web site called Vote Chooser, where visitors answer questions about their positions on various policy issues and learn which candidate most closely matches their preferences. The site has had as many as 200,000 people visit on a single day, Mr. Lee told the student newspaper.
Paul Basken | Posted on Monday March 24, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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Beyond policy preferences, the CMU students — and the rest of us — should be looking for presidential candidates who have demonstrated the ability to accomplish a great deal in an extremely complex, high-pressure environment. If our president lacks this kind of experience, we might as well roll dice on policy.
— S. Britchky Mar 25, 07:25 AM #
This isn’t the first time CMU students have gotten into it! Howard Dean cited CMU by name on MSNBC in 2004 for sending busload after busload of students to vote. (PA tilted barely to Kerry.)
Also, S. Britchky: If you think Hillary fits the bill you just wrote up, I have a bridge to sell you. She was first lady for eight years and has no major legislation to her name in 7 years of service in the Senate.
Obama’s ethics reform is already bigger than anything Hillary has delivered. (Yeah, that’s right. S-CHIP and the Family Medical Leave Act were Kennedy-Dodd accomplishments, for which she regularly takes credit. Because she has to, if she doesn’t want to seem like a big do-nothing.)
You know what else was complex, high pressure environment? The run-up to the war in Iraq.
— CMU Alum Apr 8, 02:25 PM #