Walking around campus, it’s pretty obvious that some of our classmates have already started their presidential campaigns. At Dartmouth, somebody’s already won their first election.

No, not for UA or SAC rep.

Vanessa Sievers, a Dartmouth junior, has just won the race for treasurer of Grafton County, New Hampshire, the county which includes Dartmouth. Sievers, lambasted as a “teenybopper” by her opponent, won by less than 1.5%. (And even cooler, she made the national news!)

The outgoing Republican incumbent treasurer is the kind of lady who likes to rant about “brainwashed college kids,” but is Sievers really qualified to invest and oversee Grafton County’s $18 million in assets?

She has been an active member of the Dartmouth College Democrats (She’s got sooooo many hits on the campus newspaper’s website.). And she has managed her family’s finances. And, of course, she is a geography major. So maybe this is change we can believe in.

Yet, then again, maybe people at Dartmouth are unhappy about this. In my mind, a college student has no business representing the townspeople and should not have run for this position.

Despite what I see as resume-padding and over-achieving, Sievers has a point that we could perhaps learn from: “I’ve always believed that being involved in local government is part of your responsibility as a citizen and is a way to get involved in your community.” Of course, she could have volunteered at a soup kitchen instead of running for treasurer.

But the best part of this whole thing? Sievers’ only real campaign advertisement cost $51. And it came on Facebook. Said Sievers with painful arrogance: “I took advantage of new media, and [my opponent] did not.”

Except independent analysts conclude that Sievers won not because she did anything special or was anything special. In fact, she barely campaigned at all.  She won because most voters just voted Democrat down the entire ballot.

The Grafton County Republican chairman, however, may have made the best point of all: “College students are not involved in local things at all. They’re only involved in Dartmouth College. They don’t buy property here, they don’t pay taxes here, so they’re not concerned with how the treasury is handled.”

College students with a fleeting interest in local affairs. Sound familiar?

(Curious to learn more about the newly-elected treasurer? Friend her on Facebook!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.