I love the New Hampshire primary and I love the political horse race that is the 2008 presidential election, but it has also left me with a strange sense of melancholy. A race that should be about issues and vision is being twisted by the media into a series of sound bytes and analysis of quotes, missteps, and political posturing.
From talking to my peers, there generally seem to be two sets of camps as it relates to our current presidential election. The first group includes those who are excited by the possibilities, those who see hope in the broad field of candidates for both the Republican and Democratic nominations. The second group is mostly made up of those who think both parties and their candidates are out of step with what they believe in and they feel forced to choose a candidate in spite of their convictions, not because of them.
I find myself in between these two camps, for various reasons. I believe in the politics of hope, and I believe that there are candidates out there who share my hopes and dreams for the country. But at the same time, I see us sucked into a race defined by issues like "John Edwards is rich. Does he understand poverty?", "Mitt Romney is Mormon. Will people trust him?" or "Is Barack Obama black enough? Or even black?" (A recent interviewee on "The Colbert Report" suggests, on a serious note, that no, he is not.) We need to consider serious questions about all of the candidates, but to me, these are not those questions.
If you want to analyze who has the best chance of winning, these are all unfortunately viable questions. But they do not give you an idea of who would make the best commander-in-chief for our country. There are many reasons that youth voting is substantially lower than the rest of the population, and I have my suspicions as to why. As people grow older, they become much more focused on specific issues. People who are struggling to pay for health care find reforming or radically changing the health insurance system to be a primary reason for voting. Those who are losing jobs to outsourcing or feeling the pressure of international competition turn to trade agreements and immigration. Issue-driven voters are much easier to deal with, since by definition, they vote on issues. Take the right position, and a candidate can increase vote totals.
But if you ask most Dartmouth students who they would vote for and the reasons why, I imagine they would give you a very different answer. They would tell you that they vote on hope, the hope that their dreams for our great nation can be accomplished, the hope that we can all live safely in freedom and prosperity. Every candidate has a different vision based on a different philosophy and understanding of how the world works and how government should function. However, in large part, these philosophies are not articulated to those of us who (hopefully) have a lot of time remaining in our lives, those who must live out the next 60 years under the consequences of these larger debates.
It is not that positions on specific issues are unimportant, but that these positions must become incorporated into a larger framework. Ideological purity is not as important as consistency of vision, which is neither liberal nor conservative, but American. As Dartmouth students, and voters in New Hampshire, we have a unique opportunity to shape the debate, to put candidates on the spot and to see if they are worthy of stewarding the nation for at least the next four years.
The debate on our nation's direction must begin today. We can force candidates to answer tough questions, rather than asking them to pander to regional desires. We can be the honorable arbiters of what could be New Hampshire's last political hurrah, but only if we ask of the candidates what we ask of ourselves. Convictions and vision instead of pandering and narrow matters must be paramount.
