Yes, we could

Little 500 has come and gone. I am not sure if it lived up to my expectations, but I awoke on Sunday morning feeling as though I had had one of those definitive college experiences. Now that I am done with that, I can go back to musing about the political mysteries of our time. Little 500 is actually the perfect catalyst for such thinking because of two events in particular. \nOne was Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s visit. He has now fully adorned himself with that aura of inevitability. Students fawned over Obama’s appearance – not surprisingly. He is supposedly getting the youth involved with politics at levels we have not seen in decades. \nThe other event was not as pleasant as an Obama visit. The amount of arrests the IUPD made was comparable to last year’s Little 500 weekend. Excise officers, however, claim they issued almost twice as many summonses as they did during last year’s Little 500. As always, it is disappointing to see people getting in trouble with the law for committing the apparently horrendous act (in this country, anyway) of drinking or possessing alcohol while under the age of 21.\nSo what do a bunch of drinking tickets have to do with Obama visiting IU? Everything!\nPeople say that the drinking age should be 21 for all kinds of reasons. One reason cited is to reduce drunken driving accidents, and another is to prevent damaging brains that haven’t fully developed yet. But the real reason the drinking age is 21 is that 18- to 21-year-olds have not attached a lower drinking age as a condition for their votes.\nObama often uses the slogan “Yes, we can.” He seems to imply that he and his supporters are equal partners in his campaign. When it comes to the youth, I can’t help but feel his conversation about America is a little one-sided. \nI think my generation, on the whole, tends to be more socially liberal than those before it. No one younger than 30 cares about the fact that Obama is black or that Sen. Hillary Clinton is a woman (which is why we are so tired of hearing older political commentators talk about both of those things).\nWhen I think of myself as a social liberal, a few issues in particular come to mind. I fully support gay rights (including marriage), I am very uncomfortable with the death penalty and I support treating substance abuse as more of a public health issue than a criminal issue. \nI believe most young Obama supporters completely agree with me, yet strangely enough, Obama rarely mentions those issues. On the other hand, Obama seems all too eager to trash free-trade agreements and companies that shift operations overseas. He needs to do this to get the votes of the older working class. What does he need to get us?\nIt is OK to get excited about Obama, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be hard on him, too. Young people can be a paradigm-shifting voting bloc only if they really want to be.