Congratulations to our new lead activists, Jonathan Backer and Sarah Leonard!

Winter Break is coming up, but we will have some fabulous events immediately afterward. Especially look forward to our showing at Glass House Rocks!

Oops.

"But after running through the customary excuses, Mehlman made a damning admission: "If 2006 taught us anything, it is that a good ground game alone cannot be depended upon to push us over the top. We need to remember … all of us … that it is good policy that makes good politics." From a longtime disciple of Bush and Rove, that is the ultimate denunciation of the Bush administration and Rovism: Bush and the Republicans lost because their policies didn't work."

More at Slate

I find the whole NY Daily News and Fox News obsession with Columbia, recently manifested most recently in an obsession with our sex lives, to be hilarious. However, I see a serious side to all of it, as well. The problem with the "University of Havana-North" garbage is an old one--angry neoconservatives attacking places of learning to undermine the credibility of the learning that undermines their philosophy. With the recent episode, however, we have a return to an earlier battle.

The fact that major news outlets think it acceptable to speak with revulsion about clubs established for those seeking safe exploration of sexual alternatives is a sign of a real threat to sexual liberation. Columbia has struggled to become a place in which the austere, repressive sexual politics that dominated society for most of recent history are not dominant. Students are vigorously protected from harassment, but consensual exploration and honesty has been encouraged. Groups like Alice! have worked to create a safe environment for sexual discussion and, yes, sex. Student groups have struggled to break taboos and open dialogue on issues that are important to the student body, no matter how deviant from the residual Puritanism of the American sexual mainstream. Put more bluntly, we have worked to form a campus on which real sexual liberation and equality can be achieved rather than the more common American college culture of rampant chauvinism, gay-bashing, and rejection of the weird "losers" at which Ann Coulter sneers in the Fox interview I posted above.

I am not going to attempt to pass judgement on the success of our efforts to this effect. As with all sensitive issues, I suspect that our success would be judged very differently by different people with different experiences in our diverse community. However, I will say that the goals of the actions I described are more than worthy--they are necessary. As many of us experienced in high school and still see even in the oh-so-progressive Morningside Heights, much of the progress supposedly made in the days of the sexual revolution appears to have been reversed. In much of America, sex is again a topic to be swept under the table, and the predictable pattern of shame, suppression, and unfair gender discriminations results. Members of the Columbia community should be lauded for their attempts to reverse this trend, and members of the media should be shamed for bolstering it.

These cultural conservatives are not just attacking Columbia, they are using us as a proxy for the fact-loving intellectual left and, now, sexual progressivism. Our response has been one of bemused dismissal so far--appropriate given the absurdity of the tone of the attacks. However, we should also respond seriously to the broader attack on progress in sexual and gender equity and liberation in a society in which these things are far from assured.

From Slate:

USA Today leads with word that the war on terror, focused mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq, will likely cost more than the war in Vietnam, which would make it the most expensive conflict since World War II. Congress has already approved $70 billion for the 2007 fiscal year and the Pentagon is currently considering asking for anywhere from $127 billion to $160 billion more. So far, Congress has approved $502 billion for the war on terror. Notably, USAT reminds its readers that in 2003, the Bush administration estimated the Iraq war would cost $50 billion to $60 billion.

So the trip has been over for a few days--I think we all needed some recovery time, so this is going to be the first post since Election Day. Everyone in the world already knows, but for the sake of posterity: we won big! We managed to retake the House and the Senate, an occurrence that was paying 3:1 odds over at the over-hyped Election Markets. In Ohio, we ran Mike DeWine out of office with a huge 12-point mandate for Sherrod Brown's decidedly progressive agenda. The new governor, Democrat Ted Strickland, won by an even bigger margin. We ousted at least one incumbent Republican in the House in Ohio, and are waiting to hear if we managed to topple Mean Jean.

The trip was an amazing success. I think everyone had fun, and the debriefing meeting/Majority Party on Friday was incredible. We are going to take this new momentum to every aspect of our political lives as Columbians and as Americans, and we are going to transform this country into a progressive land of hope once again.

Expect more technical posts in the future as we continue to build on this victory and work out a more permanent structure for the campaign trip. Lots of exciting ideas about institutionalisation and expansion have been thrown out, so we will keep the blogosphere updated as those come to fruition.

We are here in Ohio! I wish all of the rest of you could be here (all of you--all of Columbia). The wifi in our hotel is not so hot, and I am quite tired, so I will keep this post to a few pertinent, somewhat random facts. For a more complete report, check out the reporting of Jimmy Vielkind at the Spec.

Interestingly enough, the Republicans refused to host a Spec reporter for their campaign trip to Connecticut (they are campaigning for Lieberman--how sad is that?), so this is free publicity for us! Thank CUCR for that.

We had a few hitches at the start of the trip. Two of our favourite freshmen are sadly not with us in body, but we know they are here in spirit. We look forward to next year, when we know they will be along to enjoy the speeches of the ghost of Seth Flaxman with all of us. The late van is still not in, but we expect them within the next few hours. They deserve extra praise for leaving Manhattan during rush hour and driving through the night all the way to Cleveland to help us take back Ohio!

Our first two vans--the Red Fox and the Silver Bullet--set out from New York delighted with bagels and coffee at shortly after 6:00 this morning. The third, the Blue Thunder, set out at 5:00 in the evening. Yes, our vans are red, white (really, silver-y white), and blue--how is that for imagery? Even our rental choices are patriotic, and we could certainly not be doing a better service to this country than helping put Sherrod Brown in its Senate.

The trip went well, with much merriment in each van and an abundance of games, diverse (to say the least) music, and Arby's food. A competition between the two vans initiated by Seth--the naming of senators from all fifty states--ended with several thousand from each van. We hate to be negative, but we suspect that the College Republicans would barely reach one hundred.

The crossword puzzles lovingly printed by Julia Moline were appreciated widely in the Silver Bullet, and appreciated in spirit (we promise, Julia!) by the passengers of the Red Fox. The marvelous packets produced by President and VP Emeriti Seth Flaxman and Julia Moline have added joy and clarity to the campaign trip experiences for all of us, and we are eternally grateful.

The Cuyahoga County Democratic Campaign Office seems like a really neat place, teeming with volunteers even before our arrival and clearly ready to help carry Ohio back into the Blue. With new polls today showing Sherrod's race tightening again, we need all the dedication we can find in this heavily-Democratic county. Our arrival brought cheer to the staff, particularly the genial county director, Marquez Brown. During a trip I took with him to the office supply store with him to replenish the canvass bag supply after eager Columbia volunteers filled those available at an astonishing rate, we discussed the disappointments of 2004 and the resurgence of hope and energy in 2006. Here, as everywhere we go, the consensus seems to be that our generation will not give up because of one or two or even many set-backs, that our generation is better than all of those in recent memory because we care about people, care about politics, and care about change.

Remember to check here and on the Spec blog often for more updates as we take Cleveland by storm! Tomorrow, we work all day on the phones and the streets and then take our energy to a rally headed by none other than Barack Obama!

"What should be making NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds wet his pants (besides the fact that he is losing his own race) is the fact that two different pollsters are both predicting a disaster for the GOP. It is hard to ascribe that to pollster bias or fishy methodology. The much predicted Democratic tidal wave is beginning to become visible. It is not inconceivable that the Democrats could win 40 Republican seats and not lose a single one of their own."  More