Spirited debates

A group of BU students put a new twist on watching the vice presidential debate when they threw a ‘Palin Party.’ Students at the party ate baked Alaska, posed for pictures with cardboard cutouts of the governor and Sen. Barack Obama, and of course, took a shot every time Palin said ‘maverick’ or gave a coy wink to viewers at home.
Political drinking games for the 2008 presidential debates have found their way into all avenues of American culture. Rules for drinking games are posted on blogs, printed in newspapers and passed around college campuses.
College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Maggie Renno, who hosted the ‘Palin Party’ at an off-campus apartment, said she and her roommate threw the party because of the candidate’s distinctive character.
‘She says funny things, and we wanted to capitalize on the [Saturday Night Live] spoofs of her,’ she said. ‘The skits are hilarious no matter how you feel about Sarah Palin.’
CAS sophomore Apurv Soni said the drinking game he played at the Palin Party called for a drink every time vice presidential candidate Joe Biden called presidential candidate John McCain his buddy or said he loved McCain.
Soni said spoofs of Sarah Palin on SNL and YouTube infuse humor into the campaigns and serve as inspiration for drinking games.
‘It’s a good thing that politics can be joked about,’ he said. ‘It has more dimensions.’
As ripe for ridicule as some students may consider the current crop of presidential candidates, Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner said the trend is actually nothing new. In fact, he said he played political drinking games himself when he was in college.
‘I was in college in the late 1990s, and there were State of the Union drinking games and various election parties, so the trend is at least several election cycles old,’ he said. ‘It is more a factor of changing pop culture than it is a unique product of this specific election or the candidates involved.’
Kriner said as long as the purpose of the drinking game is not to create political apathy, then the games are harmless.
‘To the extent that it encourages young people to become aware and seek to influence a political process that they are increasingly dissatisfied with, I think it is good,’ he said.’
Though political drinking games may be new to college students, Northeastern University political science professor Christopher Bosso said the art of coupling drinking games with political satire goes back even further in history.
‘Even as far back as the nineteenth century, there were rallies and parties to promote candidates, so what’s happening today is simply a new variation on an old theme,’ he said.
News publications are even jumping on the bandwagon. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s student newspaper, The Tech, published rules for a campus-wide vice presidential debate drinking game. Students partaking in the activity chose a candidate to represent them.
According to the rules on The Tech website, Biden supporters had to drink ‘when Biden began the ‘I take the train home everyday story” and could not stop drinking until he finished.
Whenever Palin talked about being the most popular governor in the country, her supporters had to go to a room by themselves, realize they were the most important people in that room, then had to finish their drink.
BU Democrats President Krista Zalatores said drinking games are a manifestation of the excitement surrounding the election.
‘Students really are taking the election seriously,’ she said.