Category: Dartmouth

The New York Times carried an article over the weekend on "Helping Democrats Find a Way to Reach the Religious," featuring Dartmouth alumna (and Rockefeller Center Board of Visitors member) Leah Daughtry '84. Leah serves as Howard Dean's chief of staff at the DNC and is spearheading the Democratic Party's religious outreach. From the article:

The drive to reach religious Americans began after Election Day 2004, when Ms. Daughtry was so distraught over reports of a Republican landslide among “values voters” — a term commonly associated with conservative Christian voters — that she commissioned a poll on the subject. For roughly half of all voters, the poll found, religion is as much an influence on how they vote as any other factor.

For Mr. Dean, seeing the poll results was a “gestalt moment.”

“People weren’t scared about losing their jobs,” Mr. Dean said. “They were scared about losing their kids, about what was on television, and about the methamphetamine lab the local sheriff had just found.”

Mr. Dean did not have a vision for how religious outreach should work, Ms. Daughtry said, “but he had a willingness to say a rare thing in this town: ‘I don’t know. You do know, so what’s the best way to do this?’”

For Ms. Daughtry, the answer had less to do with Democrats changing positions than with engaging religious voters and articulating the values behind their positions.

Although I have no partisan interest in the Democratic Party, it is reassuring to see it attempting to put together the broadest possible coalition of voters, including parts of the voting population that it had ceded almost without a contest in years past.

Congressman Ron Paul visited Dartmouth yesterday, speaking and meeting for about an hour with a large group of students at the Rockefeller Center. Back in June, I wrote, "My libertarian leanings make me predisposed to like Congressman Paul." After attending the event, I still like him, but I don't think that having libertarian leanings should necessarily translate into support for his Presidential campaign. I'll give two reasons:

First, he's running for Commander in Chief, not Contrarian in Chief. If these are his views, and he has spent the last decade in Congress (after his earlier service in the 1970s and 1980s), then it is reasonable to expect that he would have not just voted libertarian on key issues, but that he would have built a consensus among his colleagues so that the work product of Congress was itself more libertarian. I don't see any evidence of that sort of leadership.

Second, his answers to questions of public policy tend to be too procedural for my liking. Under questioning by a number of the students in attendance about public policies, his responses in support of limited government tended to be of the form, "It is not in the Constitution, so we should not be doing it." This was the case, for example, when a student asked about the extreme inequalities in the quality of primary and secondary education across the country and what the Department of Education's role should be in addressing that. Do you allow children in poor neighborhoods to continue to get abysmally substandard education? The question merited an answer based on Milton Friedman's spirited argument for education vouchers and market solutions, not a faint protest that he'd like to scrap the Department of Education.

Today, the College Democrats and the Rockefeller Center co-sponsored an appearance by Senator Barack Obama at Dartmouth. Here's a picture of him addressing the crowd in the courtyard outside the Center.

Some estimates put the crowd at 5-6,000. That was my unscientific estimate as well from my vantage point underneath that flag. I saw what was in the picture below, a crowd that could likely have been arranged in about 60 rows of 100 people each.

There was nothing surprising about his remarks if you have heard him speak before. His line on the war in Iraq is, "We need to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in." On the domestic side, he covered the big three of health care, education, and the environment in a way that didn't seem to be different from other Democrats I've heard. Nothing on immigration as I recall.

In the press conference that followed, the questions were split between specific issues (mostly the war) and the process of the campaign. On the latter, it seemed as if the press wanted him to comment unduly on current polls, such as these, in which he is trailing Senator Clinton. He answered them politely. I think he should have used the Fight Club defense: The first rule of a campaign is, "Don't Talk About the Campaign." Talk about the issues. Talk about people.

On a personal level, he seemed both gracious and attentive, despite what is already a grueling schedule. I think he will continue to grow as a candidate, in just the way we would hope from retail politics in New Hampshire. I stand by what I wrote in these two earlier posts. There's only one poll that matters in the end.

UPDATES: An example of the press coverage of his appearance, in this post by John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. The article in the campus newspaper here. Video of the event is being posted. This link is to YouTube search results. Here's a short clip that shows his appeal--none of his rivals are as compelling on this issue.

Today's issue of The Dartmouth includes a story on Bill Richardson's speech last evening. There's not a whole lot in the story to that would reach out and pull me across the political aisle, but that's true of all of his primary competitors as well. And who knows what choices I'll have next year? I can say at this point that I approve of his sense of humor:

Despite his experience, Richardson continues to lag in the polls with his numbers fluctuating in the single digits. His campaign has raised $6 million, a figure dwarfed by the $26 million and $25 million of presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., respectively.

Richardson, however, remains optimistic.

"Money doesn't vote; it's people. It's issues and voters."

Richardson points to the steady gain he has been making in the polls.

"I was under the margin of error when I started." Richardson joked. "Now we're up to 6 percent. We're third in Minnesota. I called my staff and said how come I'm third, I haven't been there, and they said 'That's why your [sic] third.'"