President Obama visits USC to ask attendees to vote

Gloria Stanford has lived long enough to see 14 presidents reside in the White House, but she never wanted to see any one of them in person as much as she wanted to see the current president.

At 4 a.m. Friday, the 80-year-old left her home in Kern County wearing a black Obama beanie and a shirt with the president’s face on it. She drove herself and three others to USC, where President Obama was scheduled to hold a rally. Stanford and her friends stepped out of her car into the dewy morning as the sun was still rising.

But this was not the first time Stanford, a registered Republican, made a long journey to see Obama. In 2008, she drove more than 1,000 miles from California to Denver, Colo. to see the then-hopeful candidate accept the Democratic nomination for president at the party’s national convention.

“My grandfather saw Eisenhower back in the 1950s,” she said. “I was determined to go … see the first black man (to) become president.”

At Friday’s Moving America Forward rally at USC’s Alumni Park, Obama called for the more-than 37,500 attendees, including Stanford, to vote for Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. The rally followed a fundraising luncheon held at USC for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who is campaigning for re-election on Nov. 2.

Boxer and Obama were joined by gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and attorney general candidate Kamala Harris. Other presenters included Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, actor Kal Penn and California Assembly Speaker John Perez.

Obama’s Southern California visit was part of a multi-state fundraising campaign. Before stopping at USC, the president also visited the University of Washington, in part to engage an historically apathetic electorate, college students.

The rally came at a time when Democrats have been suffering a supposed “enthusiasm gap” leading up to the election, and various projections are predicting major conservative gains in both houses of Congress. Yet in the USC/Los Angeles Times poll released Sunday, average Democratic enthusiasm for voting in the Congressional race was rated as 8.2 out of 10, while Republican enthusiasm was an 8.3. Among decline-to-state voters, average enthusiasm was rated at 7.4.

The president hoped to reinstate the enthusiasm among young voters that fueled his success in the 2008 presidential election.

“I want to remind you why you got involved,” Obama said. “You didn’t just get involved to elect a president. You got involved because … you believed that this was a time when the decisions we make, the challenges we face, are going to shape the lives of our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren for decades to come.”

Some attendees, such as second-year UCLA psychology student Morgan Martin, were in need of that reminder. Martin, who said she is an avid Obama supporter, has come to realize that the political process takes a long time to accomplish things.

“I did have a lot of hope that things were going to change instantaneously,” she said. “My hope has gone down a bit, but it’s the political process that got it down, not Obama.”

Obama also addressed many key problems currently burdening the Democratic leadership and the country at large: health insurance reform, special interests, apparent Wall Street greed and support for education, among others.

“America doesn’t play for second place. We play for first place,” Obama said, referring to the state of education in the U.S. compared to that in countries such as South Korea and China. Chants of “U.S.A.” from the cheering crowd followed.

He went on to explain a plan to offer college students a tuition break. If approved, the proposal, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, would give students a credit of $10,000 over four years.

For mothers like Alisa Haney, federal changes regarding education are crucial to her family’s future.

As an administrative assistant and single parent, Haney is insistent that her 17-year-old daughter attend college.

Haney already helped her son get funds from church community members to pay for his education at California State University, Dominguez Hills. But her son also earned grants, easing Haney’s financial responsibility.

This time though, Haney expects she will be forced to take out loans for her daughter’s education.

“I’m hoping it won’t be such a burden,” Haney said about this second round of college funding.

Though the majority of students flooding the rally seemed to be from USC, hundreds of others came from UC Irvine, Loyola Marymount, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, among others.

Despite the major student presence at the rally, enthusiasm to vote in this year’s election is expected to be lower among college students. Many attendees said they were drawn in by Obama’s appeal, but they did not express direct support for the Democratic ticket.