I love attention-getting titles, don’t you? But then when that’s all they are and the article is just stupid or not really related to the title, then I’m so disappointed. Oh well, this one is kind of true. Volunteering for the Roskam campaign for 3-4 hours a day, 5 days a week (when I don’t have other mandatory obligations, which are few) has really galvanized my love of politics. Going door-to-door, calling people has really allowed me to see the direct interaction side of politics. We hear about the policies in Washington, we see Congressmen on TV, but we don’t often think about all the interns running around the neighborhoods, whether by phone or car.
Another thing has been that I subscribe to and follow a bunch of (mostly) conservative political sights. One of the ones I forgot to mention in a previous post was the Drudge Report (The link is here). This is basically a plain site with text and pictures that captures headlines form a smorgasbord of different websites, all with different topics. The vast majority of the news is about politics and the headlines are usually sort of hyped-up to slam the Democrats. It’s very informative though because it also has foreign relations news and of course, a smidgeon of the most essential celebrity gossip (Like Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston). I think that I’m going to really try to let my political views show more in my high school this upcoming year. I mean, there isn’t too much room for it because a lot of people just don’t care, but I think now the atmosphere might be a bit different because it’s an election year (albeit not a Presidential one) and Golden Boy Obama’s not what many people thought he’d be. It’s actually kind of frustrating to see how many people whose parents generally are more conservative be quite Democrat. Again though, I think this was part of the Obama-effect because DuPage County (and all the usual conservative counties surrounding Chicago) went Democratic in 08. Obama won in our school’s mock election with 63 percent of the vote or something. I just figure it was the “popular thing to do”.
Anyway, I’ve also linked up my GMail account to Youtube (I didn’t know how useful a GMail account was simply for all the other OpenID places you can use it with) and subscribed to a bunch of GOP Congressmen whose ideas I support. Besides my own Congressman, so far I have Jeb Hensarling whose articulations during the Financial Regulation C-SPAN debates were quite moving and Eric Cantor, the main Republican Whip and also the header of the YouCut initiative. I’ll definitely be adding more as time goes on. But as a note, it’s awesome to watch the short Congressional speeches made by guys like them. They just sound so articulate and line up well with my beliefs. But it’s also cool just to see anyone speaking in Congress. There’s an air to it that’s pregnant with authority and awe.
Another project I am going to be doing is the Republican Illinois Victory campaign, which is this massive calling program that’s there to take advantage of the best Republican chances for victory in IL in a long time (For those of you who don’t know, IL is a very blue state, but it’s mostly because of Chicago and a few other counties near the Mississippi and by the Southern tip). So you can do things like calling from home, which sounds cool to me. It also sounds cool because when I said I wanted to go to a call center, the nearest ones were far away, so they became unviable.
