News > August 28, 2008

By Caitlin Brooks | Asst. news editor

It started with an experiment. “Look to your left, look to your right. Can you tell whether each person is a Democrat or a Republican?” Skeptical looks and nervous laughter from the audience of bright-faced freshmen greet the question. “No? Chances are, your neighbors’ political views differ from yours,” speaker Kathleen Hall Jamieson, keynote orientation, said. “If, after five years, ten years, you can talk to them civilly about politics and continue to learn and disagree, then you will have finally gotten something, you will be different from your parents.”

Jamieson, nationally renowned scholar and commentator of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke on voting trends on Aug. 22 as part of orientation for the class of 2012.

The author of over 90 academic articles and 15 books, Jamieson is also the co-founder of FactCheck.org, an online non-profit organization devoted to examining the factual accuracy of U.S. political campaign advertisements.

Jamieson catered her discourse to the youthful audience, most of whom will be eligible to vote in their first elections this November as Barack Obama and John McCain square off in the presidential campaign.

“Don’t be like your parents, don’t marry, befriend and work with someone just like you. (Be careful not) to hunker down inside your own belief structure and not engage the beliefs of those who disagree with you about politics,” Jamieson said. “Don’t be afraid to talk about it.

“We find ourselves stuck in a political structure that feeds a divisive mentality.”

She spent the majority of the lecture encouraging political communication across party lines, a broad search for political knowledge and caution about media representation of each candidate.“For the first time in the modern study of politics we saw a change with an increased search for knowledge, increased conversation across ideology. That’s the kind of democratic engagement your generation could bring to the table. That’s why I’m optimistic about the future,” she said.

She showed a JibJab animated short entitled “Time for Some Campaigning,” designed to summarize the attacks against each candidate in an entirely satirical and absurd way.

“The structure of this video tells you nothing positive about anyone who is pictured,” Jamieson said.

“ It is the idea that politics has become nonstop attacks and sadly, reporters actually believe that. They show you the attack ads but they don’t show you the positive ads, and then they tell you that politics have become increasingly negative.”

“What you don’t see are the similarities between the candidates, even if the news agency is seemingly nonpartisan,” she said.

Freshman Erin Devine was particularly impacted by this part of the speech.

“She gave good insight about how cynical we’ve become about politics and she made really good points about how even though the news portrays the political climate as negative, there is still a lot of positive out there, even if the media chooses not to show it,” Devine said.

Using political slander ads from both key candidates, one bashing Obama for potential tax increases and the other accusing McCain of losing American jobs, Jamieson encouraged the audience to actively think outside their own ideologies. She asked Democrats and Republicans alike to identify potential inaccuracies in the ad attacking their parties’ opposition and highlighted the similarities between the parties. Jamieson wrapped up the talk with a positive note encouraging voter turn-out.

“You’ve got the long-time horizon. If you vote, they (politicians) will have to stop passing to your generation the cost of things taken by my generation,” Jamieson said.

“You could not only tell a different story about politics, but you could also command an electoral structure to think of the long term benefit of the country.”