Moving past bitterness

Beyond the bitterness, the partisan squabbling and the vicious
political attacks, the presidential election of 2004 will be
remembered as one that made people care about politics again. Both
parties registered a record number of new voters, often from the
ranks of young people and minorities, two groups with a politically
apathetic history.

Maybe it was because people just saw more at stake than usual.
Embodying such wildly different ideologies, the two candidates had
opposing stands on just about everything from how to fight the war
on terrorism to how to improve America’s schools.

Maybe the bitterness lay in the personal nature of the election
and its issues. Having a son or daughter in the military, losing a
job or knowing someone who is gay, among a plethora of other
topics, can help the politics to really hit home.

For whatever the reasons, this was an election that split
families down the middle, and pitted father against son, generation
against generation. It was as though an entirely new culture was
created. Terms that had once been reserved to the most political
among us, like “Gallup,” became household buzzwords,
while elephants and donkeys were emblematic of much more than
safari or petting zoo attractions.

— Mara Gay

Where do we go from here?

This election has occupied my mind daily for the past year, and
all I can consistently do is give some shrug-exasperated hand
gesture-jaw dropped-motion. What is left to say? This is the
biggest election in history? We’ve seen the ads for months
— the Swift boats, the Wolves, the American flags and smiling
babies — and if the ads weren’t enough, the debate and
news coverage on the ads. Yet these campaigns, though glossy and
glorious, missed how utterly dire and direction-changing the
results of this election will be. There are no words to express
this. The election brought out the best and worst in our country.
More people participated in the democratic process —
thousands of new registered voters — and “November
2” was burned on people’s brains for weeks. Yet
yesterday, we also witnessed disgusting incidents of voter
intimidation: people still tried to tell out-of-state students they
were ineligible to vote in Ann Arbor, and some Detroit residents
received letters on their doors telling them, incorrectly, that
their polling location had been changed. Empowerment v.
Intimidation. Reason v. Religion. The Enlightenment v. The Dark
Age. Left v. Right. Dare I say, Kerry v. Bush?

— Sara Eber

Hollywood Politics

Prior to this election, I had the naïve notion that
mudslinging was a sacred ritual that would only make its comeback
if there were a third installment of Woodstock. I guess we were all
treated with an early Christmas present this election with both
Democrats and Republicans resorting to unprecedented lows with
distasteful attacks and utterly ridiculous endorsements. Hollywood
celebrities and the Swift boat veterans should be admonished for
their incessant attempts to spin the facts to convince undecided,
impressionable minds to vote their way.

The celebrities whose faces grace our movies suddenly found a
way into our television sets as a part of a slew of Kerry
endorsements. A personal favorite of mine was Rebecca
Romain-Stamos’s picking up a middle-aged man in the middle of
the desert and convincing him to vote Kerry … just
ridiculous. But then who could forget veterans who weren’t
even on Kerry’s Swift boat that tried to convince us Kerry
was a disgraced soldier? Hopefully politics will regain some ethics
before we see the Libertarians or Greens getting into the mix.

— Dan Skowronski

Turning to entertainment

Certain factors that have never been prevalent in past elections
have proved integral in this year’s presidential campaign.
Sen. John Kerry utilized entertainment programs as well as
celebrity supporters in order to connect with the college-aged
voting demographic through their most favored source for news.
During his campaign, Kerry has made appearances on “The Daily
Show with John Stewart” and “The Tonight Show”
and has spoken with MTVNews on five separate occasions. In
addition, Kerry received celebrity endorsements and included a few,
Bruce Springsteen for example, in his campaign to further appeal to
young voters. Kerry’s concentration on the entertainment
media outlet has proven his care for Americans of the young
demographic and has subsequently resulted in a voter registration
surge among such youth.

—Katherine Cantor

Dean: paving the way for Kerry