College . 02/28/2008 03:54 PM . Jake Melville

Hillary Clinton doesn’t care about college students.

Oh sure, you may say she has a great plan to help make college more affordable. A Clinton administration might fix our troubled economy, increasing my chances of finding a decent job next year. You can even argue that I’ll be thankful for her health-care plan when my feeling of youthful invulnerability is suddenly confronted by a flesh-eating virus, an oncoming bus, or my youthful stupidity.

But when it comes down to the core issues that college students care about—drinking and ourselves, for example—Hillary Clinton hasn’t demonstrated that she understands the college student, and it’s a miscalculation that may end up costing her the Democratic presidential nomination. You may think I’m crazy, but hear me out.

I study international affairs at George Washington University, one of the most politically aware universities on the planet, so you think I’d be ecstatic at the prospect of Hillary Clinton giving a major foreign-policy speech and holding a fundraiser on my campus, as she did this past Monday. Instead, I’m fuming about her lack of empathy for my friends, trying to convince everybody I know to vote against her, and constantly looking over my shoulder half expecting to find a man in a black suit following me home.

Let me explain my paranoia. Sunday evening, the campus newspaper sent out a breaking news alert notifying the student body that Hillary Clinton would be holding a fund-raiser in Lisner Auditorium. This probably means nothing to you, but to me it meant a great deal.

I am the technical director for a student theater company on campus, and this Thursday we’re opening a show in the Lisner Downstage—a black box theater located directly beneath Lisner Auditorium. I had spent ten hours on Sunday staining wood and building a rather ambitious set for our show, and was planning on arriving Monday to finish putting it together in time for the rehearsal. After rehearsal, I had planned to go to an open bar at the swanky restaurant where my girlfriend works. It’s not every day I get invited to a free open bar, and I had every intention of attending this one.

Senator Clinton, evidently, had other plans.

Hillary’s arrival meant that our Monday night rehearsal would have to be postponed until she left. I’d seen enough episodes of 24 to know the threat to the security of a potential future leader of the free world posed by a half-dozen college students with power tools. But I was concerned that the postponement would mean that our set would be incomplete in time for the rehearsal Monday night. More importantly, I worried that due to rehearsal’s later starting time I would be late for the open bar, severely hampering my plans to consume free alcohol.

Anxiously, I waited by my phone all evening for the call that we were allowed to start our rehearsal. With each hour that passed, I saw the night getting longer and longer. I wouldn’t be able to finish the set while the actors were rehearsing their lines, and would have to stay afterwards to get the work done. Finally the call came, and I leapt out the door. I hurried to the Downstage, opened the door to the Black Box, and stopped dead in my shoes.

My set was gone.

The wood my crew and I had stained had been ripped from the frame that we had attached it to. A 4’x 8’ wall that we had built had disappeared, along with three other 4’x 8’ pieces of plywood we needed to finish the set. I was devastated, angry, and severely confused. On a normal day, wood doesn’t just get up and walk out the door like this.

“What do you think happened to it?” someone asked me.

I wasn’t thinking straight. I was running on too much coffee and not enough sleep. We had spent 10 hours staining the wood and putting this set together, and now it was gone? I saw the open bar slip away as I would no doubt be rebuilding the set late into the night.

“Where did it go?”

In my confused and caffeinated mental state, I grasped at the only answer that made sense to me. “Hillary Clinton took it.”

It was a crazy conclusion, but it made just enough sense to work. Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service detail arrives, and sweeps through Lisner Auditorium on a security check. They notice a suspicious odor emanating from the black box theater where we were constructing our set. Deeming the vapors from the stained wood some sort of security threat, they removed the stained pieces. I voiced my suspicions to the actors and stage crew.

The way I saw it that night, Hillary Clinton had stolen my wood. She forced me to stay later than I had intended, depriving me of an opportunity to attend a free open bar. She forced my girlfriend to socialize with co-workers alone, a fact that disappointed her greatly.

This may be obvious, but the thing about theater kids is that they love drama in all its forms. Not just the dramatic arts, but good old-fashioned gossip. Hillary Clinton had just trampled through our campus like a bull in the proverbial china shop, destroying our set and costing us precious time in preparing for opening night. We wanted to make something out of this. We wanted revenge.

I’m not saying that this slight to a student organization will determine the Democratic nominee. But in order to receive the nomination, Hillary Clinton must win the remaining primaries by wide margins, and one of those primaries happens to be in Pennsylvania – home to the third highest contingent of G.W. students behind New York and New Jersey.

And I’m not saying that our theater company is influential enough to sway one tenth of the student body to mobilize against Hillary Clinton. All I am saying is that we have friends from around Philadelphia. My girlfriend is from outside Philadelphia. She has friends outside Philadelphia, and they all have families outside Philadelphia. And they vote.

When they go to the polls that Wednesday, maybe they’ll be thinking about Hillary Clinton’s health care plan, or her plan to make college more affordable, or even her plan to disentangle the country from Iraq. Or maybe they’ll be thinking about the experience of a tiny theater company in Washington D.C. and they’ll remember how Hillary Clinton doesn’t care about college students.

If on the 23rd of April, the path to the nomination for Barack Obama is cleared because Hillary Clinton lost a hotly contested race in the districts surrounding Philadelphia, I’m not suggesting necessarily that I had anything to do with it. But I’m not suggesting otherwise, either.

Jake Melville is a senior International Affairs major at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and Slate.

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