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T H E P U L L O F P O L I T I C She was Muslim seemed too deliberate to be coincidental.“A candidate can’t necessarily control acomment here and there,” he said. “But therecame a point when it was not clear what was andwasn’t tolerated.”Tamanini began his Obama support by makingphone calls in New York, then got involvedin Washington, DC, where he’s attending graduateschool at Georgetown’s School of ForeignService. He canvassed in DC and Ohio, andhelped register independents in Pennsylvania.While the media has played up the policy similaritiesbetween Obama and Clinton, Tamaninisays he strongly prefers Obama’s positions onhealth care and foreign policy. He also fears thatClinton won’t be a stark enough departure fromthe Bush administration. “She brings the legacyof what we’re in now,” he said, “but a Demo -cratic version of it, with a lot of the baggage andthe partisanship.”Tyler Stone ’05 changed allegiances too,but even more dramatically. Remembered byclassmates as the student body president at CAand the leader of the student Republican Club,Stone said he started leaning away from theRepublican Party even before he went to college.“It’s something I’d been wrestling with for awhile,” he said. “My own political position wasevolving.”The “sheer incompetence” in Iraq “reallyjarred some of the assumptions I had about theBush administration, which I’d previouslystrongly supported,” he explained. And he wasimpressed with Obama’s 2004 address at theDemocratic National Convention; his messagesof unity resonated with a student “who hasgrown up in an era of George W. Bush, whichis defined by partisan fighting.”At Davidson College, Stone cofoundedStudents for Barack Obama; he stayed involvedwhen he transferred to Georgetown, helpingto organize a trip last fall that attracted aboutthree hundred students to an Obama rally indowntown Washington. As a student leader forObama, Stone’s biggest challenge hasn’t beenClinton or McCain supporters. “It’s been mostlywith students who were previously apathetic,convincing them that the idealism that theyhold can be put to good use by supportingBarack Obama.”To Stone, young people do want to fight forchange, but haven’t felt empowered to do itthrough the political system. “A lot of kids in mygeneration haven’t registered to vote becausethey don’t feel like their beliefs, their idealism,can be brought to fruition through politics,” he“A lot of kids in my generationhaven’t registered to vote becausethey don’t feel like their beliefs,their idealism, can be brought to fruitionthrough politics. Students really wantto bring about change. In Obama,there’s a real belief that we can express those ideals.”—Tyler Stone ’05said. “They do it through Relay for Life, or byjoining an environmental group. Students reallywant to bring about change, but they’re notdoing it through politics.”He believes his candidate is changing that.“In Obama, there’s a real belief that we canexpress those ideals,” he said.Several other CA alumnae/i rhapsodizedabout Obama and why his candidacy movedthem to volunteer. Perhaps the most noteworthyis Caroline Kennedy ’75, who turned heads withher op-ed in the New York Times supportingObama. “I have never had a president whoinspired me the way people tell me that myfather inspired them,” she wrote. “But for thefirst time, I believe I have found the man whocould be that president—not just for me, but fora new generation of Americans.”Another CA graduate, Matt Chandler ’02,played a role in Obama’s wins in Colorado andWyoming, handling press and communicationsfor those primaries, and in mid-April was thefulltime communications director for Obama’sMontana campaign.After interning at a “rinky-dink” newspaperin Colorado and becoming disillusioned at aPR firm, Chandler found a job at a political consultingfirm in Denver, where colleagues drewhim into the Obama campaign. During a March2007 rally, Chandler and a friend ended upbeing Obama’s “body men” for the day, keepinghim on schedule and attending to his needs.“He left me with a very strong impression,” saidChandler, who opted to leave the consultingfirm to become a media liaison for Obama. Hehas guided celebrities such as Forest Whitakerand Kerry Washington through campaign stops,making sure they got on camera and stayedon message.A few days before Super Tuesday, Chandlerwas sleep-deprived but animated. “We werehanging out last night until 2:30 a.m., answeringemails and making sure our precinct captains hadall the information they needed,” he said, thenwent on feverishly to describe a twelve-year-oldprecinct captain in Boulder and the hundreds ofhigh school students making phone calls andknocking on doors.He stopped to breathe. “I was supposed todo this for a week,” Chandler mused. He iscaught up in the pace, which he finds both exhilaratingand challenging. “There’s an endless21WWW.CONCORDACADEMY.ORG SPRING 2008