Last Friday, on the heels of endorsements from two Kennedys and victory in the South Carolina primary, Obama-mania touched down in Middletown. State Senate President Pro Tempore Don Williams, former Connecticut senatorial candidate Ned Lamont and Kal Penn, the actor most widely known for his role as Kumar in the 2004 movie, “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” all spoke on campus to endorse presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
The rally, organized by Connecticut Coordinator of Students for Obama Max Rothstein ’11 and Wesleyan Coordinator of Students for Obama Bradley Spahn ’11, was held in SCI150 in Exley.
Seats in the 300-person lecture hall quickly filled up. Some students were forced to stand and others were simply turned away at the door. After speeches from Williams and Lamont, Penn, who is currently a visiting professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed the ebullient audience. Penn was once a “cynical inde-Penndent” who had never publicly endorsed a political candidate and who usually felt like he was picking between “the lesser of two evils.” Penn said, however, that he was moved to political involvement when he found that a friend of his in financial trouble had two options: either working a minimum-wage job or driving a truck in Iraq for Halliburton.
“I thought it was a really sad day when the world’s richest country could only offer two options for a buddy of ours, and that’s a minimum-wage job and a $90,000-a-year job in a war zone just to get college money,” Penn said.
Penn said that he has found in Obama a man of integrity comparable to his grandfather, who marched with Ghandi. Penn has found Obama’s stance on the war in Iraq particularly admirable.
“When Senator Obama was running for reelection, he decided to speak out against the war, and his aides said, ’Senator, you are running for reelection, the war is testing at an 85 percent approval rating, and you will not be reelected if you speak out against the Iraq war,’” Penn said. “The story goes that Barack looked at them and said, ’If the only way to get reelected is by lying about the way I feel about the war, then I don’t deserve to be reelected.’”
Moved by Obama’s candidacy, Penn—admittedly with free time on his hands, thanks to the writers’ strike —traveled to Iowa to campaign for the Illinois senator. While there, he discovered another of Obama’s admirable traits: a sense of humor.
Penn said that during one speech Obama addressed an accusation from the Clinton campaign website that, according to documents, he had wanted to be president since kindergarten. Then, Penn said, he took it a step further.
“So Obama said, ’I should probably also come clean about something else. In kindergarten, I pulled on a little girl’s pony tail once. And I liked it,’” Penn recalled. “We were all just sitting there going, ’That’s amazing.’ Instead of buying into negative campaigning, he just totally deconstructed something with a joke, something that could have gone in a bad direction that the press would have loved to have eaten up—but he didn’t even give them the chance to do that because he wanted to talk about real issues.”
Lamont, who, as a Greenwich, Conn. town selectman, stunned the pro-war incumbent senator Joe Lieberman by winning the 2006 Democratic primary (though he lost in the general election), addressed the argument about Obama’s level of experience, a criticism that Lamont himself often faced in his senatorial campaign.
“You mention Barack Obama’s name and what does everybody say?” Lamont asked. “Experience. How about experience? It’s always people who’ve spent most of their life in Washington, D.C. who say, ’I can measure someone’s experience from the amount of time they’ve spent in Washington.’ And I think that’s hogwash. Go for breadth of experience right now. Go experience different things.”
Overall, the speakers stressed the importance of the Connecticut vote, which is split between Clinton and Obama in today’s 22-state Super Tuesday primary. Don Williams, who has served as a state senator since 1993, said that this election is unique in that respect.
“I have not seen an election like this before, where first of all, Connecticut has played a big role,” he said. “Super Tuesday—22 states—and you got major candidates coming to Connecticut, including Barack Obama coming to Hartford on Monday.”
Lamont agreed, saying that while usually Florida and Ohio seem to be the only states that matter, this election is proving that wrong. He also cited the “80-20” rule, one of the first pieces of advice that he received in his campaign for senator, as a predictor of potential results.
“The 80-20 rule is that 80 percent of the 80-year-olds vote and 20 percent of 20-year-olds vote,” Lamont said. “It’s so important that young people turn their energy, their passion and their enthusiasm into votes, and while they are at it, call their grandparents and tell them how to vote.”