Wednesday, September 17, 2008

BYU Democrats -- The Hottest Club on Campus

Last night, I took the opportunity to attend the second Fall Semester meeting of the BYU Democrats Club.

At their first meeting, they had somewhere between 150-170 people show up. Numbers are usually smaller for a second meeting of almost any group, and that was the case last night, when "only" 65 people came.

Still, 65 people at any kind of Democratic meeting in Utah is great. And that it happened at BYU is even better.

Club President Randall Serr told the crowd "We have the responsibility to be the progressive voice on campus, and to be a loud voice"

We had messages from the RaDene Hatfield and Don Jarvis campaigns. We also heard from someone who spent the summer interning for the Al Franken campaign in Minnesota. He is organizing a phone-banking goup to call Minnesota from Provo.

We also heard from some of the BYU students who traveled to Colorado to canvass for Barack Obama last weekend. They are planning to go back next week. We got an update on the plastic bottle recycling program that the BYU Dems got started last year, which has been picked up and expanded by the school.

Then we watched a video of John Kerry's speech from this year's national convention.

The BYU Democrats have broken into issue-advocacy groups, which will meet every week to discuss their issue, and are in charge of writing an op-ed for the student paper that will appear each week.

In addition to all of this, they have a booth set up on campus from 10-4 every day.

Looks like the BYU Democrats are bringing change to their school.

-Bob

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you know that BYU-I is disbanding its College Democrat and College Republican organizations in favor of a Public Policy Society? Will this happen at BYU?

Anonymous said...

Here is a great link on the value of partisan organizations:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/02/nancy-rosenblum/the-moral-distinctiveness-of-party-id/