Mehr Singh Co-Editor-in-Chief Honors Politics students spent all week worrying about Friday. It marked the day of the first official “news cycle war.” The topic was the economy, including jobs, the deficit, and taxes. Both campaigns had to put together media campaigns (for each campaign’s digital ads, check out their websites – just log in using your Latin account) and create campaign websites with information on their candidate’s economic policy and its advantages. (One section of the class acts as the Romney campaign and the other section acts as the Obama campaign.) On Friday, each candidate made a speech (written by the students, of course) on the economy in a strategic location of their choice, while other members of the campaign competed in a Twitter war throughout the day. Romney chose Jacksonville, Florida while Obama chose Lancaster, Ohio (for explanations on each location, check out each campaign’s website). Campaign members anxiously compiled research, polls, interviews, and speeches on economic plans. During classes leading up to Friday, students thought of great ways to attack the opponent, while being careful to have a filter in front of the national correspondents sitting in the room (Annie McDonough and Andrew Nadler, for the Romney and Obama class, respectively), who could make any little whisper they heard into the next day’s headline. Students worked incredibly hard. Senior Rachel Stone commented, “Thursday night was probably the first time I’ve ever seen that many Latin students on Facebook at 3am.” It even got to the point where at the airport on our day off on Wednesday, a person heard me talking to Kevin Ward, one of the Obama campaign’s speechwriters, about the polls our pollster had found in key states, and turned around asking me, “Who are you? What campaign do you work for?” Of course, I felt pretty special, but it was hilarious – and amazing –  that the man actually thought I was a member of the real campaign. And then as soon as I landed back in Chicago, I felt like I had been out of touch with the campaigns for days. The twitter war between the campaigns on the @LatinHonPol page had gone from intense to personal. A clear example is when Kevin Ward tweeted “ @AntheaFisher @LatinHonPol So, Romney will raise Middle Class living standards by taxing them? Or did he decide to explode the debt? #logic.” Now, as Mr. Greer hoped, we weren’t just sending tweets to the class page, but to people’s personal pages. By Friday, it was taken to an even further level as students were waiting for the opposing campaign to make some silly joke that could be blasted on the Internet. Both campaigns were excited for Friday’s events to see how well their campaigns had prepped. And things heated up pretty fast. In the Obama campaign, campaign manager Henry Pollock even had to open the window by the end of President Obama’s (Matt Lucas) speech. In the end, both classes did well at their event and on the twitter page. Of course, being one of Obama’s campaign managers, I’m a little biased, so check out the links below to see what each campaign accomplished, and decided for yourself who won the news cycle…And keep an eye out for William Pritzker (Governor Romney) and Matt Lucas (President Obama) at an assembly soon for a presidential debate. Obama Campaign: https://sites.google.com/a/latinschool.org/obama2012/ Romney Campaign: https://sites.google.com/latinschool.org/romney2012/ Matt Lucas’s (Obama) speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRy2MIW48gA&feature=g-upl William Pritzker (Romney) speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7c8XMq13Iw&feature=context-gau Obama press conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dnJfvZm68&feature=context-gau Romney press conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XZK5ii0dW4  ]]>