Student believes Obama is best candidate for 2012 election

College students in the twenty-first century have a lot to say; yet only about 10 percent of freshmen participate in political campaigning of some sort to get the word out about their desired candidate. For most college kids, it would be the Democratic candidate. According to The Huffington Post, “a new study shows that college freshmen do indeed hold more liberal views than ever before on social issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, and immigration rights.”

For me, the social issues are more important since they are the rights I am dealing with. I’m not concerned with handling the debt or paying for healthcare yet, I’m only 18. For Rebecca Shankman, the chair of the Democratic Campaign Office of Radford, the social issues were of great concern to her as well. As a former elementary school teacher, working firsthand with the consequences of reforms and cutbacks, she stated “funding for education was always better when democrats were elected.” In particular, she mentioned that Tim Kaine helped with the education budgets.

With buzz over the looming election getting people’s panties in a wad, people need to realize the pros and cons of both parties.

Republications are not all stuffy, traditional washrags, just like Democrats are not all crazy, drug-loving hippies. Shankman refutes, “It’s a humane party. [We are] much more concerned about those who are without.”

Yet with Obamacare being passed in 2010, it is clear that the Democratic president was and still is interested in the whole nations well being, as opposed to the current Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, who seems to only be concerned with the wealthy one percent (although he claims to contest this, it is made clear in several speeches and debates). The coarse ‘flip-flopper’ just can’t seem to decide whom he wants to lie with: the lowly (but majority) middle class, or life with the wealthy and prominent where he has been all his life.

If there is one thing we need in a president, it is sensitivity to economic struggle. Romney has never been without, so what makes you think he will help out the ones who have nothing? He may throw a dog a bone with a tax-cut on lower to middle class families one time, while lowering taxes on big businesses and corporations multiple times.

I just don’t see how the choice is not clear. Just as Romney has been linked to keeping gay marriage and abortion illegal, Obama has been linked to giving women the right to choose, and gay’s the right to marry whomever they love. Rebecca Shankman could not have said it any better when asked what she believed to be the strongest ideal of the Democratic Party. “Inclusiveness. We have our own biases but we are a very accepting party.” So who will you vote for this November?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FOR THE TARTAN