By Luofei Deng
November 4th has finally come to pass, and I could not be happier. The outcome of the election has nothing to do with my joy though. Instead, I am just happy that campus life can return to normal. The College Democrats and College Republicans can return to their little holes and go back to planning the next election cycle, scheming how to maintain relevance in the interim and ardently debating the hot topics in current events to promote their inflated sense of self-worth.
It is not my distaste for politics or general douchebaggery that leads me to rip on the College Republocrats. It is the frenzy of campaigning and propaganda that both sides generated during the run-up to the election.
For a few weeks, one could not walk across the Green without being accosted by an Obama supporter hocking a wide variety of paraphernalia ranging from a poster of Obama as Che Guevara to a simple sticker of the Big "O" with its subliminal socialist message of a sun rising over a field of grain.
All the pandemonium surrounding the election came to a head on Election Day. The little fetus of chaos that the two sides had been feeding since the term began was finally born in a flurry of campus-wide Blitzes on the hour, every hour. Enormous amounts of sidewalk chalk were used to turn all the walkways around campus into a Candyland of ephemeral campaign slogans.
What is the point of all this? Does the constant bombardment of a political figure's name make him more electable? The College Republicans and Democrats put in so much effort campaigning for these politicians, but I wonder how effective their tactics were.
After being harassed by Obama supporters into taking a bright yellow Obama pin, do I really want to vote for him? Or should I just vote for McCain out of spite? A vote for Obama would place me in the same group as the tree-hugging, socialist hippies handing out hemp bracelets. Do I really want to be associated with these people? At the same time, do I want to be grouped with the diehard McCain fans who tried to hand me a documentary DVD about how Obama is a Muslim, and Muslims are like Nazis, and by the transitive property, Obama is a Nazi?
Do campus political supporters really think that going to such extremes will help them gain support? All it does is annoy people and make themselves look like political radicals or worse, mindless party lemmings.
In fact, that reminds me of something. I have always wondered, do the College Democrats and College Republicans have some sort of private rivalry that no one else knows about? Maybe they pull pranks on each other, like Republicans call all the Dems "asses." And then the Dems, in retaliation, go and mismatch the College Republicans shirt and tie combinations. I am sure these two rivals throw down some wild and crazy tomfoolery on each other. They should make a sitcom about it. I am sure it would be more enjoyable to watch than the election returns last Tuesday night, although CNN's holograms made the whole night worthwhile.
Luofei is a staff writer for The Mirror. We let him out of his Page-2 Reboot and Rally cage this week. Clearly, that was a mistake.
