Just under three months ago America was overcome with voter frenzy. With the results in and the new laws starting to be implemented, many are breathing a sigh of relief that they can tune out politics for a while.
Those people are wrong.
The beginning of 2007 has arrived with announcements from several potential candidates for the 2008 presidential election. With only 22 months to plot their ascent to the throne, oops I mean the presidency; candidates are scrambling to win their party’s nomination.
Front-runners for the Republican Party are former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Senator John McCain, according to the Angus Reid Global Monitor. Front Page Magazine shows the Democrats being led by ex-first lady and current New York Junior Senator Hilary Rodham-Clinton; former vice-presidential candidate and Senator John Edwards and Illinois Senator Barak Obama.
Al Gore and John Kerry are looking for a bid, too, but seriously: they’ve both dropped the ball before and the Democrats can’t face another humiliating loss.
So all this has happened in the past few months, and I’ll bet most students in their three-week Winter Break coma didn’t even notice. But now that this is pulling out front in the news it’s time to drag ourselves back to reality and start looking into these potential leaders of our country.
All too often what we see is 75 percent of the country realizing in August that there’s an election coming up and they should probably brush up on the candidates. That is not soon enough. In order to make fully educated decisions, Americans need to be watching these developments as they happen, not reading about them after the fact.
In a recent LA Times article, poll results revealed that 40 percent of Democrats don’t know enough about Barak Obama to form an opinion about him. This isn’t even Americans in general, this is Democrats. My own party doesn’t know enough about this charismatic and potentially revolutionary candidate to even form an opinion.
Obama embodies many of the most important issues of our time. Not only would he be the first African American to run for President of the United States, he’s spoken out against many of the pitfalls with the current administration.
He’s spoken out against genocide in Darfur, the AIDS epidemic and has urged for the withdrawal of troops in Iraq.
He’s a man for the issues, not for the politics. According to Barakobama.com, on Nov. 3, 2006, Obama visited Maryland in support of white Democratic candidate Ben Cardin. He spent his time there urging blacks not to vote along racial lines, but rather on individual candidates and issues.
This is what we need. While many will criticize Obama for his lack of experience, I feel what we really need in our government are some fresh, new ideas. There will always be advisors to offer insight, but after eight years of the ‘Bush Experience’ even Ralph Nader is starting to look good.
We’ve had the same stodgy old white men running America for the past, oh 231 years or so. It’s time for a change. But in order to do so, we need Americans to care. We need to stay informed about the happenings in the political arena.
We need to voice our opinions before Election Day so we can avoid being forced to choose between the lesser of two idiots.
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