The brief moment of fame the Stanford in Washington (SIW) students and their cutouts enjoyed was not the only way this year’s election has affected their experience in the nation’s capital. In fact, for most SIW students, the election was the satisfying culmination of a quarter of political mania.
Repeating the results of the historic 2008 presidential election, voters at campus precincts overwhelmingly supported President Barack Obama on Tuesday. An exit poll conducted by The Daily showed that 88.11 percent of campus voters favored granting the Democratic candidate a second term.
Proposition 36, which reforms California’s three-strikes law, is headed for passage while voters have rejected Proposition 34, which would have eliminated the death penalty, and Proposition 37, which would have mandated the labeling of genetically-modified food. Governor Jerry Brown’s signature ballot initiative, Proposition 30, will likely pass by two percent.
Rice made few references to either Republican talking points or their nominee: she only used Mitt Romney’s name five times and only obliquely attacked the incumbent president.
More than 830,000 supporters signed an initiative drafted by members of Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project that, if passed by voters, would modify California’s Three Strikes Law. State election officials received the signatures last Thursday.
With less than a year to go before the 2012 general elections, Stanford’s political organizations are shifting their focus to the upcoming election season.
Names, like the people who give them, can be terrific liars.
Take, for example, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, which is not remotely democratic, run by the people or anything like a republic. (One almost longs for the days of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans, when big, mean empires, while admittedly big and mean, were at least honest about being empires). Or consider the PATRIOT Act, whose provisions for spying on American citizens and trampling all over our basic civil liberties were anything but patriotic.