Student Volunteers on the Campaign Trail
By Dan Sanders

Running for president, of course, involves an army of workers to perform a universe of tasks.  Phone calls must be answered, lawn signs staked, press releases typed, faxes sent, errands run, mail opened, websites maintained.  Campaign managers and press officers marshal the effort of course, but as in any army, the cause lives and dies with the quality of its foot soldiers.  Most of the day-to-day tasks are performed by volunteers, and their energy and morale is positively indispensable to a presidential campaign effort.  These individuals do what are often long hours of menial tasks for no pay except hurried thanks. 

Why do students volunteer for campaign work?  For some it's a learning experience to augment government courses they're taking.  For others, it's a way to make contacts, perhaps prove oneself in a way that will lead to a job if the candidate wins the election.  Still others hope to plant the seeds for a political career of their own.

The American President spoke with a quartet of students who will be volunteering for presidential candidates running in the 2000 election.  Tracy Hills is an eighteen-year-old senior at Tigard High School in Tigard, Oregon.  Twenty-year-old Nashville native Russell Taber is a junior at Georgetown University, majoring in government.  He was an office volunteer for the short-lived Lamar Alexander presidential campaign.  Jared Asch of Boca Raton, Florida, twenty, is a senior at Florida State University, where he is active in Young Democrats.  David Talley attends the University of North Carolina as a political science major.  He is twenty-four and heads Durham's Young Republicans chapter; he will work on the George W. Bush campaign.

Q:  Why did you get involved in the campaign — what made you decide to help out, in an era where, supposedly, the big money has bought and paid for everyone who gets the job?

Russell Taber:  Well, I'm majoring in government, [and] it particularly interests me.  I took a class in the second semester of school that was called Presidential Electoral Politics.  It had a great teacher, and that really got me interested in campaigns.  I'd been familiar with the work of Lamar Alexander, and I thought he was a great candidate.  It's not every year that you've got a presidential candidate from your hometown, so I thought it was a great opportunity.

Jared Asch:  I guess I'm in a little different situation, I accidentally got involved in politics, I never thought I'd be involved in it.  I've been lucky; I've always worked for candidates I really believed in.

David Talley:  There's probably two reasons, for me.  One, it's sort of a hobby of mine.  I kind of like the competition of it.  Other people my age watch the Super Bowl or the World Series, and I enjoy watching debates and inauguration ceremonies.  The second reason is, deciding who's going to run our government is the most important thing there is.

Tracy Hills:  For me, it'd probably depend on what the candidate's platform was.  If it was something I really believed in, then I might want to get involved with it.

Q:  What are your duties as a campaign volunteer — what do they have you doing there?

Russell Taber:  I help out with e-mail responses, and I help write political updates.  I help write press releases, and with answering the phones. 

Jared Asch:  I've done volunteer and paid work.  I first got involved with State Congressman Robert Wexler's campaign here in Florida, in 1996.  Then after I moved away to college, I did stuff for Clinton and Gore, coordinating the campaign in Tallahassee.  I've done a lot of paid work in the state legislature.  In '98 I worked on state legislature and attorney general campaigns.

David Talley:  I'm definitely going to help out the George W. Bush effort, but right now I'm helping a mayoral candidate here in Durham, doing website design and communications work.

Q:  Is there a set schedule, or do you just show up when you feel like it?  You get there to the campaign offices, what's your shift like?

Russell Taber:  They've really let me work as much as I've wanted to, because there's a lot going on.  I usually come in from eight to five.

Jared Asch:  For Clinton-Gore, it was simple stuff, just going into the office for a few hours.  Things like . . . six days before the election, we suddenly had about 20,000 bumper stickers, and we had to get all those out to people really quickly, all over the state.  I helped do newspaper clips, all the Florida stories, and some data entry.

Q:  What, ultimately, are a president's greatest responsibilities?

Jared Asch:  Their biggest responsibility is to have the good of the entire country at heart.  And to move America forward, both in economics and in military strength.  It's their job to make sure that everybody eats a meal, and that everybody who wants a job has one.  It's their job to see that everybody has access to the kind of education they need.  To make sure people feel safe walking the streets.

David Talley:  It's just to maintain our national security.  I think state and local government have the responsibility of everything else, I don't think it's the federal government's job to ensure public safety at home, all those kinds of things that they try to get their hands into.  The president's job and the federal government's job are to maintain relations with other countries and to protect our borders.

Q:  What makes a good president?

David Talley:  The same thing that makes a good person.  Honesty, integrity, character, dedication, hard work.

Tracy Hills:  Someone who can lead the country in times of crisis.  Someone who will listen to the people.

Q:  What will be the big issues in 2000?

Russell Taber:  I'd say education is big, especially after what happened at that high school in Colorado.  I do think that foreign policy is going to be an issue, with problems like Kosovo, and the Chinese espionage business.

Jared Asch:  People are going to want somebody who they think can lead us into the new stage of technology, who can keep us in a dominant role in the global scheme of things.  The U.S. has always been a world power, but now there are questions about our level of education, our moral standards, our human rights, our employment.  Our crime—we have more people in prison than most advanced countries.

Russell Taber:  If the economy's going well, that doesn't hurt either.

David Talley:  As with every election, people want to know about the bread and butter issues.

Tracy Hills:  The morality of the president will be an issue. I wouldn't be surprised if Medicare, Medicaid and HMO's are still up there.  School safety, after all those shootings.

Q:  As we're doing this, George Bush Jr. is being all but crowned the Republican nominee — six months before the first primaries.  A lot of people are already speculating that he will be the next president.  And no one has voted yet.  How does something like that affect a campaign like the one you're working on, and to the process in general?

Russell Taber:  It just inspires us to get our own message out, because Bush hasn't come out with his own stand on any of the issues, and we have.  And that's something that Lamar Alexander is really big on.

Tracy Hills:  It's making them one-track.  They're not going to look at all the other candidates who are thinking about running in the primaries.

Jared Asch:  I don't like it, personally, on either side.  I think it's wrong for the party to anoint their leaders like the Republicans have done on the side.  In the late 1970s more states started primaries because more people wanted a say in the nominating process.  You know, I drove up to Plains, Georgia a couple of weeks ago to attend Jimmy Carter's church service.  And you're driving into this little town, and the nearest gas station is twenty minutes away, and where I live you drive twenty minutes and you'll see a hundred gas stations.  But a guy from this little town became president, and that had to do with those primaries.

David Talley:  I think it's just that people are so excited about this candidate [George W. Bush].  And I don't think that he's being anointed or he's being placed there because it's his turn, because we did that in '96 with Bob Dole.  He'd been the Senate majority leader, and a lot of Republicans thought that he was qualified.  With Bush, it's . . . we like what Bush did in Texas, and we can't help it if we're enthusiastically for him.

Q:  What have you seen in student elections that you've been able to apply to presidential politics — how are they the same, and how are they different?

Tracy Hills:  They both have a tendency to have to use people.  And with both, the best people aren't inclined to run because of what you have to do to get it.

Russell Taber:  Well, obviously, with a student election, it's all pretty grass-roots.  Person to person contact, selling yourself.  But I think the way the early presidential primaries and caucuses are, in places like New Hampshire and Iowa, that there's some remnant to the grass-roots aspect of the presidential campaign.  But with a national election, of course you have the media, and when they settle all over a guy like they have George W. Bush right now, it kind of takes away from the voter's importance.

Jared Asch:  With both of them, they go after the people they know are going to vote.  At Florida State, where I go to school, there's about 3,000 people voting in student elections.  So the candidates for student office, they go to the fraternities, and the sororities, and the main student unions — the people who are going to vote.  You see that in a presidential election too.  That's partly why voter turnout is down; they're going to go to the core base.  Nobody reaches out to the people beyond that.

Q:  People are being elected president now who are getting about a quarter of the eligible electorate, and that makes it hard for them to claim a true majority or a mandate from the people.  What changes would you make to get people who aren't voting back into the process?

David Talley:  I would definitely do as much as I can over the Internet, as far as registering and even, once proper security measures are implemented, letting them vote online.  For a twenty-four-hour period, nationwide.  That way they could do it anytime — at work, at home, at the library.  People would have no excuses then.

Jared Asch:  I think it's what you do in the off-election years.  You need to reach out to new people, to people who are disenfranchised from politics.  They're everywhere — at the supermarket, at schools, at the Lion's Club, at the NAACP.  They need to find a way to reach into those people's lives and talk to them.

Q:  One of the stereotypical images of people a few years older than you — the so-called Generation X group — is their apathy and negativity about things like presidential politics.  Do you think Generation Y will be more idealistic and politically active than those ten years older than yourself?

Tracy Hills:  I think it will, because within the last couple of years, the presidency has received a lot of attention, and people my age are hearing a lot more about how the government works, and understanding it more.  And it's giving us a picture of what the president should be, and what he shouldn't be.  A lot of it is going to depend on the parents.  If the parents are negative, the kids will be negative.

David Talley:  I would hope we'll be more involved, but I don't know how qualified my answer would be, because my friends and my organization, Young Republicans, that's who I hang out with, and that's who I'm around, so I can't help saying that we are idealistic.  I'd like to see more people take an active role in it.  But if they're not interested and they're not educated, I think they should stay away from the polls.  If they're just voting for the sake of voting, I don't think they're doing the system any good at all.

Jared Asch:  Unless something major comes around, like the 1960s and Vietnam, I think people are going to care less.  People look at George W. Bush, and they see somebody who's being bought, and that they have absolutely no say in that.  And people think, what is he gonna do for me?

Q:  You're part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet as a key part of your life.  How do you think it's going to change the way we choose a president?  How will it change the way a president does his job?

Jared Asch:  I think it's going to make politicians talk more to the people.  The Internet means that politicians have no excuse for not reaching out to the people.  And that goes the other way — calling your congressperson might be a long-distance phone call, but sending them an e-mail is free.

Tracy Hills:  As more people use the Internet, a lot more are going to have access to websites about the presidency.  Some may be good, some may be bad.  The president is going to have to be a lot more careful, because if one little tad-bit of information gets out in the open, it's going to get on the Internet in a second, and everybody's going to know about it.  I think eventually, the president will have to use the Internet as a tool to reach people.  But he's also going to have to be a lot more cautious about his personal life, and what he does when other people are around.

David Talley:  As far as getting the message out, I think the broadcast media will still be competing to shape the candidates and their own views. I think the public sites, such as CSPAN's site and Project Vote Smart, are great because they can compare the candidates on the issues, line by line, even on the local level.

Q:  Do you have any political aspirations yourself?

David Talley:  I do.  People ask me if I'd ever like to be a governor or a senator, and I tell them that it's nothing that you can plan on, it's just kind of a matter of . . . if the opportunity is right.  I'd definitely like to do that, and I'll look into doing it, but I can't make a plan of that happening.

Russell Taber:  Myself, not directly.  It's something I'm fascinated with.  I mean, I'd love to run a campaign someday.  But as far as being a candidate myself, I really don't have those kinds of aspirations.  What bothers me is the "gotcha" aspect of politics, because I don't know if I'd like getting bashed in the media every day.

Jared Asch:  As of now, no.  If it happens and I can do a lot of good, then great.  If I can be the guy behind the candidate, then that's great too.

Tracy Hills:  It's not for me.  I think I'll stick with medical school.

Dan Sanders is a writer living in Santa Monica, California.

Suggested Activities

The following are suggested topics and activities that springboard off this piece:

Discussion

a. Jared Asch feels that it is a president's responsibility to "make sure that everybody eats a meal, and that everybody who wants a job has one . . . to see that everybody has access to the kind of education they need . . . to make sure that people feel safe walking on the streets."  David Talley, however, counters that "I don't think it's the federal government's job to ensure public safety at home, all those kinds of things that they try to get their hands into.  The president's job . . . is to maintain relations with other countries and to protect our borders."  Who do you agree with, and why?

b. What would be the advantages to the nation of making the presidency a single, six-year term as Jimmy Carter proposes?  What would be the disadvantages?  In particular, how would it affect how a president attempts to implement his/her agenda?

c. At present, only about half of eligible voters usually take part in presidential elections.  To return disaffected voters to the polls, what changes do you think should be made to election laws, candidate strategy, and use of technology such as the Internet?

a. Each student must contact a local campaign office for one of the presidential candidates by telephone, letter, fax, or e-mail, and volunteer for a two to four hour block of time.  Students will write a brief (250-500 words) report about their experiences.  For more ideas on this activity, go to the Join a Campaign lesson plan. 

Website

a. Divide the class into four groups.  Each group will construct a website for one of the actual presidential candidates.  Each site should tell the public about the strong points of its candidate and the weak points of the opposition.  Within each group, assign students to the tasks of writing, creating artwork, and site programming.