BY TALLY SHARMA

In print | Published November 16, 2006

Although the elections are finished, several months’ worth of letter-writing, phone calls and door-to-door canvassing will remain for some Swatties long past Nov. 7. Either as an extension of a summer internship or as a component of a particular class, this year Swarthmore students found various ways to get involved significantly with the tense, long-awaited midterms.

This summer, Kristen Traband ‘08 employed her knowledge as a political science major and worked in former Representative Curt Weldon’s office in Washington, D.C. When the fall semester started, she remained with the campaign, dedicating 10 hours per week to activities including arranging information packets and making phone calls. During the summer, Traband said that giving tours of the Capitol Building was a “nice break” from some of the clerical work that she was otherwise assigned.

Traband said that as November approached, an extensive amount of energy was devoted to door-to-door canvassing and encouraging people to vote. “We spent a lot of time identifying people that were undecided and trying to persuade them,” she said. Traband said that her overall involvement with the campaign allowed her to become acquainted with politics at a unique depth. “Because I interned with Weldon over the summer, I knew a lot about the issues that were surrounding the campaign,” she said. “I was aware of the reasons why his supporters thought he was a good fit for the job.”

Similar to Traband, Daniel Leigh ’09 had a campaign experience that carried over directly from a summer arrangement. As a committee person for the Swarthmore Borough Democrats last semester, Leigh gathered that the campaign for Bryan Lentz for State House was looking for a summer intern, and ultimately pursued the position. “I jumped at the opportunity because the internship included a stipend, which is pretty rare for political internships,” he said.

By the time the fall semester began, however, compensation was not a concern for Leigh anymore; although the campaign was no longer paying him, he continued on as a enthusiastic member of the staff. “By that time, I was really invested in the campaign,” he said. “I had a commitment to winning. I’d gotten to know Bryan and I’d gotten to know the staff — the fact that I’d become good friends with them was a big factor.”

Among the jobs that Leigh performed while working with the Lentz campaign were working with development, managing the campaign’s volunteer base, organizing the contact information for relevant newspapers and becoming familiar with voter databases. In addition, he participated in several canvassing events: while Bryan Lentz knocked on over 16,000 doors by the end of his campaign, Leigh had accompanied him on a significant number of them.

Despite the considerable amount of time he invested in “Bryan Lentz for State House,” Leigh said that his involvement did not detract from academics. “The time pressures forced me to prioritize my time,” he said. Leigh also said that participating in the campaign to the extent that he did had rewards on multiple levels. “I think you get a much deeper understanding of the campaign,” he said. “When you’re there all the time, you get to take part in the decision-making, and you’re able to familiarize yourself with the internal structure of the campaign.”

Although not all students might have had the opportunity to get involved with campaigns to the extent that Traband and Leigh did, they certainly had other chances to occupy themselves with the enormous build up to the elections. Associate Professor of Political Science Ben Berger ensured his own students’ political engagement by making a community-based internship a requisite for his class, Democratic Theory and Practice. “It allows students to get involved at local levels,” he said. “Some students chose to work with non-political community activism groups, while others opted to work with formal political campaigns. There were certainly more on the Democratic side, but not all; I wanted to let students choose a side in which they believed.”

Berger said that one of his goals in including this experience as a component for his class was for his students to gain a practical perspective on politics. “Some political theory texts paint a romanticized portrait of political participation, as if all of us could be ancient Athenian orators. This isn’t the way that politics is experienced by most people on the ground, and one of the purposes of the internship is to strip the scales from students’ eyes,” he said.

“One really positive outcome of the internships is that students feel like they can make a difference when they get involved,” Berger said. “For example, this year in particular students working with the Democratic campaigns surely felt as if their efforts could actually make a difference in the country’s welfare. They experienced a sense of efficacy and cooperation, part of the upside of politics.”

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