Pomona Today: Campaign Stop

For one day in February, Pomona was ground zero in the race for president.

James Solomon '06 and Kyle Warneck '05 got the call late on a Sunday in February. Democratic Sen. John Edwards' presidential campaign wanted to know if they could organize a stop at Pomona College on Wednesday--only three days away.

"We were like, 'You've got to be kidding,''' says Solomon, a public policy analysis major.

Then they went to work, calling Dean of Students Ann Quinley, who talked to President David Oxtoby. By 8 a.m. Monday morning, the Secret Service was on campus to prepare for security, even before the event was officially on.

Until then, Solomon and Warneck had served in more basic roles as volunteers for Edwards' campaign, phoning supporters, distributing fliers and trying to generate interest in the candidate.

Now they were plunging into a frenzy of preparation, coordinating with campaign staff and campus administrators. Warneck stopped going to class (his professors understood he was getting a different type of education) and he stopped sleeping for all but three hours a night. "It was a rush," says Warneck, a sociology major.

Issues ranged from planning crowd control to publicizing the event to distributing tickets. Cell phones rang incessantly, and Warneck's dorm room became Edwards' temporary Claremont campaign headquarters.

"They helped us with everything," says Kristy Young, who was a field organizer for the Edwards campaign. "They were just amazing."

The students received plenty of assistance from campus administrators, who put in long hours to make the last-minute event possible. "There's no way we could have done that at a bigger institution," says Warneck. "The fact that they let us get away with this is amazing."

The pair learned about the elaborate (and often last-minute) stagecraft that goes into a presidential campaign visit. Campaign staffers changed the seating arrangement in the Smith Campus Center's Edmunds Ballroom three times between midnight and the event's 11 a.m. starting time.

Then the big moment arrived. Hundreds of students and journalists packed the ballroom. Edwards unveiled a new stump speech focusing on the problem of poverty, and the event drew widespread media coverage, from CNN to The New York Times. (The candidate even started mentioning Pomona College in his speeches after the visit.) Solomon got a kick out of being interviewed on Swedish public radio.

Solomon and Warneck were on stage during the speech and they got to briefly meet the candidate. But there were limits to their access. At one point, Warneck tried to approach Edwards to give him a Pomona College sweatshirt, but Secret Service agents blocked him.

The pair was drawn to Edwards even before the North Carolina senator's surprisingly strong second-place showing in Iowa made him a serious contender in the Democratic race. They backed Edwards for his detailed policy proposals on issues such as health care and education.

And they certainly didn't give up on Edwards when he dropped out of the race one week after the February 25 Pomona visit. "He's not done," says Warneck.

The same can certainly be said of Solomon and Warneck. Those three adrenaline-filled days fueled their passion for politics. "It was the best part of my time in college so far," says Solomon. 

—Mark Kendall