Campus David
| ✊ | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 18-24 |
| Home | Berkeley, CA |
| Demographic | student, white, activist |
| Lean | progressive |
| Race | white |
A white undergraduate activist at Berkeley, the cast's youngest voter and its representative of the New Left, with almost no political weight in 1961 when Kennedy becomes president. By 1968 he is the president's loudest domestic opponent.
Who they stand for
The student New Left began with the founding of Students for a Democratic Society and its Port Huron Statement in 1962. It grew during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964. It became a mass movement in 1965, with the first campus teach-ins and the march on Washington against the war. Its base was the white, middle-class children of the postwar baby boom. They attended college in numbers no earlier generation had matched, and college enrolment more than doubled during the decade. Most of them could not vote, because the voting age was 21 in all but four states until the Twenty-sixth Amendment passed in 1971. As a result, this bloc's political influence came mainly through protest and through the presidential primaries, rather than through general elections.
Its political activity included civil rights work in the South, such as Freedom Summer in 1964, opposition to the draft and the war, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where clashes between demonstrators and Mayor Daley's police split the Democratic Party. Eugene McCarthy's showing in the New Hampshire primary in March 1968 was its one electoral victory, and it helped drive a sitting president from the race.
Playing to them
He responds to a president who ends the war's escalation, stops the draft calls, and treats the civil rights movement as an ally instead of a problem to manage. Domestic reform matters less to him than the war does, and an increase in troop numbers outweighs any Great Society programme in his eyes. He does not forgive the use of napalm, a bombing campaign, the presence of federal agents on campus, or a president who calls protesters unpatriotic. To him, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover is proof that the government is opposed to people like him. He is the hardest voter in the cast for a president to keep, because he judges a president on intentions and ideals, while the presidency generally requires practical compromises.
Winning him has a high cost elsewhere in the cast. Pentagon George and Teamster Sal read every concession to him as surrender. Prairie Ruth and Goldwater Barry Jr see the counterculture being rewarded. Union Hall Frank and GI Bill Bobby dislike him personally. Faculty Eleanor shares his goals but not his tactics or manner, so a president who keeps her support has done much of what is needed to keep his support as well.
Where they live
The five states where Campus David makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Washington DC
- Massachusetts
- Vermont
- New York
- California