Opinion

Caucusing is key to forwarding causes in upcoming election

By Gabi Berube

Posted on Jan. 31, 2008, at 12:00 a.m.

Once every four years political junkies like myself emerge from the woodwork and champion nine months of good ol’ fashioned presidential campaigns and debates.

This season the campaign fervor kicked off way too early, exposing potential voters to a barrage of stump speeches, ads, debates and sound-bites. Beyond our general overexposure to this year’s contenders, the novelty of having both a woman and a black man competing against one another for the Democratic nomination has piqued the interest of several hard-to-mobilize voter blocs. People want change so much they’re actually getting involved in the big, bad political process. I love it! I couldn’t feel any more warm and fuzzy and still write about it for the newspaper.

This is why I implore, encourage, challenge and dare you to be a full participant in our democratic process this year. Not just on election day in November, but in choosing the candidate that best reflects your idea of our nation’s leader. Therefore, I would like to present to you my top five reasons for participating in this year’s Maine caucuses:

No. 5: This whole “young people don’t care about our country and our duties as Americans” shtick my parents’ generation has been touting for the past few years is seriously getting old. I am confident that my generation is fairly well informed on the issues, and I’m pretty sure we’ve got a grasp on how all those issues relate to one another and us. I think one of the biggest reasons our parents see apathy in the Millenial Generation – those of us born between 1980 and 2000 – is because they’ve taught us that the “system” is corrupt and not worth their time to fix. Well, it’s about to be our turn working with this system, and we might as well make the best of it.

No. 4: I wholeheartedly subscribe to the belief that if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. If you neglect your rights and duties as a member of our democracy, you opt out of your right to complain when the candidate the people have chosen comes up short. Why would you want to deprive yourself of the right to whine about the shortcomings of your party’s candidate compared the candidate you caucused for? That’s just silly.

No. 3: When you caucus, you are an important part of the democratic process. So important, in fact, that people will try to persuade you personally to come on over to their side to support their candidate. You will be courted by multiple people simultaneously and who doesn’t want that?

No. 2: A representative democracy is only representative if you participate in it. Our elected officials cannot reflect our thoughts, wishes and needs if they don’t know we exist. If we participate, we become the voice our politicians listen to instead of corporations and lobbying groups. It’s not that our democracy abandoned us in favor of these special interests, it’s that the special interests have become the only interests taking an interest in our democracy.

And the No. 1 reason to participate in this year’s Maine caucuses this February? Caucusers do it in groups! Oh yeah, I went there – and it was good.

Gabi Berube is a member of the Progressive Student Alliance and loves to “do it” in groups.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.