Barack Obama is the new President, and the reaction at Harding High School in St. Paul is eerie silence.
Hmong students make up a little of more than fifty percent of Harding’s student body. Normally the Hmong community votes for the Democratic party, but Hmong students at Harding supported both candidates.
What everyone expected has happened, yet now that it has happened, students are wondering, “What next?”
Although some students were cheering Obama’s name up and down the halls during passing time Nov. 5, their voices were loud but few. Two days before the election, three Hmong students offered up their opinions on the presidential candidates.
Teng Moua, 17, said he supported Republican candidate John McCain because he was more “experienced.” Yue Cheng Xiong, 17, said he supported the McCain because he had a “solid economical plan that would help create more jobs.”
They said they preferred McCain because they felt he prompted people to be self-sufficient and to not rely on the government. They also said they were influenced to support McCain by something that IB History teacher Peter Beck said earlier in the week.
“There are two students in a class, one with an A and one with an N. The student who had an A worked hard to get where he was while the student with an N slacked off and didn’t do much. Now the teacher says that he or she wanted everyone to pass so he took the grade of the student with an A and changed it to a C and gave the points he took away to the student with an N so everyone would pass with a C. Is that fair for the student who worked for the A?” Teng said, quoting Beck.
Sou Xiong, a senior who supported Obama, disagreed with what had been said, replying that it was “time for change”.
“After eight years with a Republican president, the only thing that is going to bring us back up would be a Democratic president,” Sou said. “We cannot move forward as we currently are, so the only solution is to have a new president whose views and policy are different from what we have had the last eight years.”
Both sides ultimately agreed that the country needed some form of change.
After the election, although the two McCain supporters wanted him to win, they said that they hoped that President Obama “would be able to bring change for the better of our country,” Yue Cheng said.
All three students said they planned to stay politically involved and agreed that they needed to pay attention to politics to ensure the people representing them do their jobs correctly so the country will grow and prosper as a country.
The first thing the three students want to see Barack Obama do is meet with John McCain and others to discuss solutions to the current economic crisis.
- East African immigrant students support Obama 100 percent, Ubah Medical Academy, predominantly an East African immigrant school in Hopkins, Minn., was buzzing with joy and excitement over the pervious nights elections Nov. 5. Not a single student at Ubah supported John McCain. Student were euphoric as they exchanged greetings and congrats. Every other sentence you heard in the hallways contained the phrase “We made history!”
- Reactions to election evenly mixed at surburban Catholic school, It seemed that nearly half of the Catholic school students were upset their beloved McCain had lost: wearing red to support the support the Republican party, posting Facebook statuses questioning America’s future, and even threatening to move to Canada.But for every McCain supporter, there was an equally passionate Democrat at Benilde-St. Margaret’s.
- Twin Cities teens react to the election, !
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