Education

College editorial boards stand staunchly with Obama

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If an exhaustive poll of student newspapers around the country is a reliable predictor of Tuesday’s presidential election results, Mitt Romney is headed for a disaster of Mondale-esque proportions.

Over the weekend, The Daily Caller hunted down the endorsements of 25 independent, student-run newspapers at colleges and universities in 25 states. All but two of those 25 papers have endorsed Barack Obama for a second term. That’s an approval rate of 92%.

For the editorial staffs at many college papers, staying the course Obama has charted on the economy is vital.

“The Obama economic program presents a logical and responsible solution for sustaining the new-and-improved American economy,” said the staff of the University of Alabama’s Crimson and White. “Changing our direction midstream now would not only be irresponsible, it could be catastrophic for our recovering economy.”

The staff of the University of Missouri’s Maneater similarly charges that the country cannot afford to change economic direction.

“Expecting Obama to fix the economy in four years is absurd,” The Maneater said. “Any president would need at least eight years to climb out of the economic hole Obama’s presidency was born in.”

The Maneater also pitches higher taxes on the rich in the name of fairness as a reason to pull the lever for Obama.

The budding scribes at Yale focus much of their argument for Obama on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

“We want our gay friends to be able to marry, and we recognize that women have the right to choose,” said the Yale Daily News. “President Obama was the first president to vocalize his support for marriage equality. He appointed judges to the Supreme Court who would uphold the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade.”

Among other things, the Daily Orange staff at Syracuse sings the praises of Obamacare.

“Young adults can stay on their parents’ health care up until age 26,” The Daily Orange said. “This directly affects and benefits college students. Having universal health care will also increase the quality of life and well-being for Americans across the country.”

Obamacare is not the same thing as universal health care, of course, but never mind such trifling details.

At the Daily Californian, Cal Berkeley’s student rag, the editorial staff admits that the economy is sickly and unemployment is too high. Staffers also note that accumulated student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. And they are also concerned that polluters have continued to pollute throughout Obama’s administration.

Still, the Daily Cal’s cub reporters can’t bring themselves to abandon the Democratic ticket.

“At the end of the day, Obama is the all-around better candidate,” they said. “He’s better for education, better for the economy and better for the American people.”

TheDC searched high and low for editorial staffs at major campus newspapers or, for that matter, any campus newspapers that are bucking the conventional wisdom of their fellow college journalists, but found only two.

The renegade editorial board at Georgetown University’s weekly student newsmagazine The Voice has endorsed Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. (The Voice is not to be confused with The Hoya, Georgetown’s oldest and largest independent student publication.)

Stein, who currently polls at less than 1% nationally according to the Pew Research Center, supports massive military spending cuts, debt forgiveness for existing student loans and a Green New Deal that would create 25 million green jobs.

She has been arrested three times in the last three months, most recently in Texas for attempting to deliver food and Halloween candy to demonstrators camping out in trees to block the expansion of the Keystone Pipeline.

A lone voice — perhaps the lone voice — among college newspapers in support of President Mitt Romney for president comes from The Daily Campus, the student-run paper at Southern Methodist University. The staff there hammers away at the economy and Obama’s failure to fix it.

“Deficits have been upward of $1 trillion every year he’s been in office, and show no sign of improvement in the near future,” The Daily Campus contends. “The economy hasn’t recovered to nearly the degree it needs to, and the labor force participation rate is at a 30 year low.”

“Romney appears at his core to be a man who cares almost exclusively about the economy, and the level of focus that he’ll have on this issue alone is one of the main reasons we can support him.”

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