"I think that the best way to explain pollution in Texas is to turn off the lights!" bursted Democrat Adam Green regarding Republican environmental policy. "Then you can imagine how the smog is so dense there that you can't even see!"
The debate was not however, as substantive and informed as it could have been.
Unlike many young voters who don't know that "Dubya" is a clever moniker for George W. Bush, the students sitting on the stage Wednesday night definitely knew more about their party's issues than the average oblivious youth, and were able to apply this information with relative ease.
Yet the one thing that left many students disconcerted that night was the fact that the debaters chose not to keep the debate real and issue-oriented but leaned towards style and political savvy in the face of tough questions. These students weren't intentionally trying to play a role, but their natural inclination to emphasize cheers and canned responses over policy was very telling of how young people in general adopt the same techniques that they criticize politicians for employing.
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Where is our generation going in politics? It's the zinger that keeps stumping both parties in this game of political Jeopardy. It's the question that Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson tried to answer by doubling the budget of the National College Republicans from $100,000 last year to $200,000 this year. It's the reason that Al Gore had 25-year-old Andrei Cherney write the Democratic campaign platform.
Despite their attempts to have their attractive young nephews and daughters talk about our generation, politicians know that the people who really have the power to change the tone of politics today are the young people themselves, if they so chose. The problem is that we don't.
In the 1996 presidential election, about one-third of 18- to 24-year-olds voted, while turnout jumped to nearly 50 percent in the next age group and to nearly two-thirds of those 65 and over.
One demographic consideration though is that not only are there fewer youngsters who bother to vote, there are fewer of them relatively speaking, further weakening what power they may hold as an electoral bloc. While 18 percent of the American population was between the ages of 18 and 24 in 1972, that figure stands at 12.7 percent today. (http://www.yvote2000.com/news.html?Source=/Archive/2000/6/8-69401.html)
The issue isn't really about numbers and how we can increase them as much as it's about changing the sly face of politics that youngsters see when they turn on the news or hear about the election. It's about changing the apathy that's at the root of this low youth turnout in the first place. Young voters have the opportunity to effect change in their debates by being what the candidates aren't in our eyes -- knowledgeable and aware. Yet as witnessed even at the University, when an explanation about gun control or abortion isn't so simple, we take the easy way out and scream a rabble-rousing cliche that illicits empty cheers of motivation that mean little.
The implication is that the debaters had to bear the burden of our generation and speak as representatives for all of us.
This isn't the expectation at all -- they're still young too, and if they wanted to entertain the crowd and not take the whole show too seriously it's completely natural. The point is though, if students forget to take responsibility for understanding policies when they're so-called spokespeople for a party, then don't expect the average student on the street to take responsibility either.
"Though we often moan and groan about the way politicians emphasize style over substance, how they evade difficult questions with nebulous and impertinent responses, and how they rarely take strong stands on controversial issues, it seems that in the end we ourselves neither demand nor expect much more than this," said Vinay Jain, the moderator for the University Debate. "But, in the final analysis, even such an exchange is far better than none at all."
In a recent Medill News Service poll of 1,008 young voters, it was found that 72 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 ranked honesty and trustworthiness as "absolutely crucial" qualities in the next president. If we expect so much from our leaders, it's time we start expecting the same from ourselves. If not, then it's perfectly fine to simply be enthusiastic about campaigns and parties, but let's not pretend that we actually do practice what we preach.
(Diya Gullapalli is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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