I love election season. For my money – though it may be worth less with each passing day – the displays of sudden civic-mindedness that we’ve been seeing in the media and right here on campus certainly tops any other quadrennial event.

The Olympics? Come on. Election season even trumps base-, foot-, and basketball seasons, deer hunting season and even the holiday season.

Why shouldn’t that be the case? Presidential elections tend to bring out the democratic spirit in all of us to some degree, even if that doesn’t extend much beyond shouting various tirades and harangues about the state of things.

This is the season when everyone’s true colors show; when one is likely to see a normally mild-mannered person wearing her politics and values on his or her lapel.

Around here and, I’m sure, on most other college campuses across the country, this is all the more extraordinary. Doubtless you’re all familiar with the apathetic reputation young people and college students have acquired since the voting age was dropped down to 18 a few decades ago. That’s right: 18-year-old voting privileges are a recent development.

The young voting block has been heavily fought for by candidates ever since, and the college-aged youth of this country have never failed to meet that effort with inaction.

This year, however, it appears that this is turning around. College students are registering to vote in record numbers, encouraged by what these candidates give to national politics. The two presidential candidates are such seemingly opposite characters that even the XBox and MySpace crowds are finding it difficult to remain opinion-less.

What this means here on campus is a proliferation of folding card tables set up with a group of like-minded advocates smiling in chorus as you walk by on your way to class. Voter registration accounts for a lot of the political presence out on the quad on any given day, though many of the groups represented – College Democrats, College Republicans and various assemblies of student stumping for their pet cause.

Many non-student political demonstrations mark a day’s wander across campus these days as well. Did I mention these are largely older people such as retirees and the like?

That one sign-toting,raspy-voiced homophobe made his appearance, for example. There are many others. Homophobes and so-called “pro-lifers” apparently overwhelmed by free time. They’re present for any sort of remotely topical reason: Ballot initiatives, Jewish holidays, guest speakers, Martin Luther King Day, just to name a few.

But recently, there has been another guy of a new breed, and I couldn’t stop myself from talking to him. His name was Tony Andrade, the petition manager behind the Gray Davis recall effort some years back who currently is involved in getting a petition around to reform California’s electoral college.

“Steven Spielberg – this is how much he hates what I’m trying to do,” Andrade beams as he plays with the remaining syrup-soaked bits in his packaged plastic fruit cup. “Spielberg put up $25 million to fight this.” Apparently, Bradley Whitcomb of the West Wing (“The East Wing, or whatever,” as Andrede knows the show) has also been speaking out against Mr. Andrade’s efforts.

He speaks of Hollywood’s distaste for his proposal with a degree of pride.

I first noticed his table on the periphery of the quad because it was ostensibly, and emphatically, promoting the vice presidential part of the Republican ticket. He likes Gov. Palin so much, in fact, there was an ready-made mock-up of a “Palin 2016” presidential election poster, and his table was overwhelmingly dotted with Sarah Palin buttons. One of them – I doubt it to be of official McCain/Palin 2008 campaign approval – featured Gov. Palin smiling with a stripe of pink making up the backdrop, emblazoned with the phrase “You go, girl!” in white, scripted font beside her head.

Being that this man and his folding card table were a rather specific and uncommon take on the day’s political goings-on, I felt a journalistic obligation to inquire further.

Andrade has quickly become a fixture on the quad; his face showcasing a missing bicuspid and shaded beneath a sort of wicker cowboy hat with a sticker reading “NOBAMA” applied to the front of it. You know the one – the first O looks like it was supposed to be one of those circle-slashes, like “No food on the bus,” though it looks more like a computer’s version of the numeral zero. His vest was in the stylish and attention-getting, greenish neon color of a CalTrans reflector. It actually was a CalTrans vest, as far as I could tell.

The first time I spoke with him, Andrade’s expectation for the coming election was that there were enough disgruntled Clinton voters to keep Obama from the presidency – the scenario then becomes a Clinton versus Palin battle eight years from now. This is a proposition he was visibly excited about and one he predicts with some enviable certainty.

My most recent discussion with Mr. Andrade went much like my first one, though his table had expanded on the Sarah Palin theme a bit to include local politician Dan Lundgren, and his tirades went from prognostication to a slightly more desperate-sounding, rhetorical jab against the Democratic party.

“You know about the Robin Hood theory?” He asked me this each time I saw him that day. “What’s the first word of it? Steal. That’s what they want to do, steal from the rich.” He was incensed, vague though his reasoning was.

With less than two weeks until the election, it would behoove anyone still undecided to pick a side. Vague reasoning may be all some of us have to make decisions with.

Cody Bishop can be reached at [email protected]