D.C. mayor talks at Oberlin College
Jason Hawk | The Chronicle-Telegram
OBERLIN — Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C., stood Saturday night at the same Finney Chapel podium where former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich had lectured Wednesday.
Like Gingrich, Fenty was at Oberlin College to stump for a presidential candidate.
But where Gingrich’s superstar name recognition filled 1,200 seats, Fenty drew a crowd of 300.
For all the size difference, the applause from Saturday’s audience was just as loud as it welcomed Fenty, a 1992 graduate of Oberlin College visiting his alma mater to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
“It doesn’t seem like it now, but people had almost no confidence or belief that Barack Obama could be president of the United States,” Fenty said, recounting the day in July 2007 when he formally backed Obama for the first time.
He called that day one of the most important of his political career.
Fenty served as an intern in both the Senate and House of Representatives, and then as an aide to Washington, D.C., Councilman Kevin Chavous.
Voters awarded him his own seat on the city council in 2002 and made him the capital’s youngest mayor ever.
Fenty said he decided to support Obama because he will champion the rights of women and the poor, and fight homelessness.
Fenty was also impressed that Obama’s early criticisms of the Iraq war proved to be accurate, he said.
But he said Obama’s best quality is that he’s unified so many people under one banner. The Illinois senator will also change the political landscape in Washington by naming Beltway outsiders to his cabinet, Fenty predicted.
“What the opposition has done to Obama is say he’s not qualified to be president because he’s new to Washington,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that’s exactly what makes him so appealing.”
Freshman David Fisher, 18, said he attended the speeches by both Fenty and Gingrich, but still sides with the Obama camp after hearing each side speak.
He said he believes the two most important issues this election season are global warming and addressing the ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
While Fenty said voters in his city are guaranteed to side with those issues and the Democratic presidential ticket, college students and other voters here could tip the balance in Ohio, which is among the most influential swing states this election.
He said Oberlin College students could hand Obama the election by canvassing in the Greater Cleveland area — especially in areas that saw low voter turnout in 2004.
That kind of grassroots activism is already thriving in Oberlin.
An Obama campaign organizer told the crowd that more than 1,000 Oberlin College students have been registered in the last 27 days to vote.
The campaign is making an average 1,200 phone calls every day to Lorain County residents and knocking on 800 doors every weekend to endorse Obama, she said.
Junior Andrew Watiker, 20, has arranged to bus more than 800 Oberlin College students to do early voting at the county Board of Elections office in Sheffield Township — regardless of which candidate they support.
“We want to get as many students as we can to vote before Election Day so we can keep those voting lines short,” he said.
Watiker’s bipartisan efforts landed him an interview Saturday morning on CNN.
“I haven’t even seen the tape yet, so I don’t know how I looked on TV,” he said.
Contact Jason Hawk at 329-7148 or jhawk@chroniclet.com.
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Filed by Jason Hawk | The Chronicle-Telegram September 28th, 2008 in Top Stories. Popularity: 2% |
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