College Democrats endorse Obama

Greenstein, who represented the Obama campaign at the meeting’s discussion session prior to the vote, said she was not surprised by the amount of support he received at the event.

“On a college campus, I would expect that [Obama] would have a lot of support,” Greenstein said, explaining that young people are “less jaded.”

She added that Obama inspires people to action in a way that reminds her of the vivacious spirit she felt as a young person in the era of Robert Kennedy. “He makes what seems impossible possible,” she said.

Not all Princeton Democrats, however, felt the same way, Adam Baron ’08 noted. Obama may have “more vocal support” than Clinton, he said, but the 65 percent does not necessarily accurately represent the Princeton student body.

Baron, who worked on Clinton’s campaign as assistant to the New Jersey finance director and leads the group Princeton Students for Hillary, spoke on the New York senator’s behalf at the event.

Baron explained that the College Democrats’ decision to vote to endorse a candidate was a show of “iconic support” that, while appealing to the more vocal and visible Obama constituency, tends not to attract Clinton supporters.

“I think it’s a slightly skewed crowd,” he explained, adding that he didn’t come to the event expecting to change people’s minds.

College Democrats president Rob Weiss ’09, however, saw the endorsement as a step of “decisive action” in a race that “has gone on long enough.”

“Even if a lot of minds were made up already,” Weiss said, “it was definitely a fair representation of the will of the student body in that we had a sizeable turnout, and both sides really mobilized a lot of people.”

“I wouldn’t say that it’s made people more energetic,” College Democrats project coordinator Julia Kaplan ’11 said. “It’s just given us an opportunity to get people together and talk about this exciting primary.”

“Ultimately, this is the Democratic primary,” Obama supporter Neha Bansal ’11 said. “We’re going to have one of these two candidates as our primary nominee, and I’m going to be supporting either one of them.”

It is “absolutely critical” that the Democratic Party shows unity “so we can have a Democratic president,” Greenstein said. “Both of them will do a good job, definitely better than Senator [John] McCain [(R-Ariz.)].”

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Though Greenstein and Baron agreed that Clinton and Obama’s policies are similar, Baron noted that the candidates “have very disparate ideas about the executive branch,” explaining that Clinton would be far more effective than Obama at running the “everyday functions” of “a massive apparatus like the U.S. government.”