It was a chaotic few minutes when I first found out that President Barack Obama was coming here to Ohio University. I honestly couldn’t process it at first, but once everything settled down, I stopped for a moment and asked myself why would he come to Athens, Ohio, three weeks out from the election? It’s actually not that complicated of a reason.
President Obama’s re-election hopes are fading rapidly.
Voter enthusiasm among most voting groups gives an advantage to Gov. Mitt Romney at the moment. According to a recent NBC poll, 79 percent of Republicans are “extremely interested” in the election compared to 73 percent of Democrats, a six-point advantage for Republicans. In 2008, Democrats had a 13-point advantage.
A key voting group that helped Obama win in 2008 was young voters. Fifty-two percent of 18- to 34-year-olds are “extremely interested” in the election. That’s down 20 points from four years ago. That is why I believe the president is coming to Ohio University on Wednesday — to try and energize what before was a reliable voting demographic for him. The president leads Gov. Romney in this demographic in terms of support, but what good is that when there is such significant apathy from this group?
It’s easy to understand why our voting group is so indifferent at this stage. Four years ago, President Obama ran a campaign of hope and change, a message that resonated with millions of Americans in a historic election. Our economy was in trouble, and promises of job creation and cutting our deficit in half were made. College affordability, unemployment under 6 percent, millions of new jobs — I could go on with this point.
You know what we got instead?
An economy where one in two college students can’t find a job in their fields of study or a job at all; record deficits of more than $1 trillion each of the past four years and a net job creation of 325,000 since Obama took office. Many of the jobs created are part-time jobs that we didn’t go into thousands of dollars of debt to get a college degree for. More Americans are dropping out of the workforce as each month passes by. The United States for the first time in history lost its AAA credit rating, hurting all of us. On top of that, the complete absence of leadership in Washington to fix our problems.
When a president runs for re-election, he does so because he believes what he is doing is working to make America stronger and that we should stay the course. That’s the question that we will face next month: to stay on the path of the past four years or plot a new course. President Obama isn’t going to say anything new, and most likely he’ll give a speech that makes it sound like he wasn’t our president the past four years. He’s right in the sense that we haven’t had a leader in the White House the past four years.
Dylan Gustafson is the communications chair of the Ohio University College Republicans.
