I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that you are one of the people who wants George W. Bush out of office. While I am aware that conservatives do exist at Brown, Brown is a place where liberal ideologies remain the status quo.
So to all the George-Bush-haters out there: Let's play a game of pretend. Let's pretend that in November 2000, you and five of your friends took a week off from school and went down to Florida. Each day that you were there, in between lying in the sun and hitting up the clubs, each of you convinced 14 people to get off their lawnchairs and vote for the Democratic ticket. Al Gore would be president right now. Thanks to you and your friends.
I'm not kidding. Bush "officially" beat Gore by 537 votes. Five hundred and thirty-seven. (And even this estimate has been heavily contested.) Which means that had you and your pals bummed around Tampa for a few days, the most reactionary right-wing administration in American history - the very administration that is currently festering in Washington - never would have been able to ooze its way into the White House.
Today, we are not playing a game of pretend - far from it; today is dead serious. A couple more facts for you about the 2000 election:
According to the Swing State Project (www.swingstateproject.com), both New Hampshire and Florida, among a number of other states, were decided by less than 1 percent of the vote. Both states went for Bush.
New Mexico, however, did not, though the race was equally close. This is largely credited to a group called Youth Action, which worked to turn out 2,016 young, Hispanic "unlikely" voters. Gore won New Mexico by 366 votes. If a similar group had orchestrated the same action in Florida, there is a good chance that these past four years never would have happened as they did.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming you, personally, for the debacle of 2000. Not at all - I did not go to Florida, either. At that point, most of us were in high school, preoccupied with pre-calculus and the prom. More to the point, in 2000, we didn't know what a Bush presidency meant. We had no idea that Bush would campaign from the center, win on a technicality and govern as if he'd had a conservative landslide. The WMD witch-hunt, Every Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act, the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade. In November 2000, all were nothing but a twinkle, a creepy little twinkle, in W's eye.
But now it's 2004. We're in college - we've gained the freshman 15, we've gotten our hearts broken and we know exactly what George W. Bush is all about. And in 2004, you have another chance to bring about very real change.
You know that the election is going to be razor-close. The difference between a regime change and four more years of Bomb-o-Rama will come down to how many college students send in their absentee ballots on time to Pennsylvania. It will come down to how many Ohio moms remember to stop by the polls on their way home from work. It will come down to how many disorganized people in New Hampshire know that they can same-day register on Nov. 2. It is going to come down to the nitty-gritty numbers, the margins of error - and those margins are not very big.
Should I remind you again? Five hundred and thirty-seven votes.
"All right," you say. "I get it. It's close. But let's be realistic here - what can I actually do?" (Being the typical Brown student that you are, you most likely have already processed the horrors of a re-election scenario, decided it's too late and made tentative plans to move to Europe.) But before you book that plane ticket, hold on a second.
You can go to a swing state. You can remind people where they go to vote. You can help schedule rides to the polls. You can drive voters with no cars to their town hall. You can register voters on Election Day. You can do all of this with other Brown students. The Providence League of Pissed Off Voters and BEAN are co-sponsoring buses and cars going up to New Hampshire on Election Day itself, the Saturday before, and every day in between. If you are interested, e-mail Kate_Moulding@brown.edu or Maura_Finigan@ brown.edu. We have room for you. The Brown Democrats also have buses to New Hampshire and Ohio.
Come with us or come with them, I don't care - just come. If you've never done anything political in your life, this is the time. The most important election of our lifetime happens in about 96 hours. You can do something.
And we can win.
Maura Finigan '05 is a member of the Providence League of Pissed Off Voters.
