Lisa Minus Zero / No Limit
By Amy McDaniel
A&F Editor

Lisa Merrill ’05 knows people on the Hill. That’s Capitol Hill, where Lisa spent the summer interning in Senator Hillary Clinton’s office. Yet for all her Washington connections, Merrill is ready to make new contacts that are potentially as influential as senatorial aids: the people of California.

Armed with a couple of pizzas and a stack of registration forms, representing enough potential votes to sway a presidential race in Florida, Merrill and her political cohort, Kate White ’05, walked into the Smith Campus Center Fireplace Lounge on Sunday prepared to incite Claremont Colleges students to action. Thus began the inaugural meeting of the Students for Improving Democracy (SID).
Merrill’s internship taught her an important lesson: elected officials, as well as candidates, care about votes. Not letter campaigns, not telephone calls, and not even face-to-face visits. If you don’t have money, your solitary vote is the best thing you’ve got to give to voice your opinion for a candidate.

There’s going to be a recall vote, for better or worse, and whether or not the delay withstands appeals. SID’s strict nonpartisanship capitalizes on an opportunity that is produced by, yet shielded from, the party politicking described in the dailies. It’s democracy, baby.

“Alternative media. Inclusive debates. Open primaries. Campaign finance reform. Ballot education. Initiative referendums. Voter registration.” Merrill lists conditions yearned for and tactics used to little avail by independent parties and under-financed primary candidates, which have a much-increased relevance in these pre-recall days. The state is evenly divided over whether to recall Gray Davis. And with so many candidates, no opportunity for a run-off, and no clear choice from the Republican contestants, a Claremont Colleges voter registration drive might make a difference.

The bipartisan system has turned on itself, and while the recall might seem like one big Kindergarten Cop joke, Merrill knows well that it is also a way to engage and mobilize the populace of the largest state in the Union.

Bob Dylan could have been describing Lisa Merrill when he sang, “In the dime stores and bus stations/ People talk of situations/ Read books, repeat quotations/ Draw conclusions on the wall./ Some speak of the future/ My love she speaks softly.” Merrill does not have a platform, a pedestal, or a megaphone. She is no rabble-rouser, and she does not capture attention with an emotive voice or with eye-catching hand motions. She does not attempt to display her personal politics or her personality by wearing certain clothes or partaking of certain substances.

Dylan’s song exalts a calmness and focus readily apparent in Merrill. Consciously or not, she relies on the content of her words and the strength of her arguments. Her quiet authority engages her listeners, her steady eye contact creates rapport and her apparent anxiety about the success of her club belies her deceptively dispassionate tone.

Merrill’s steadfast composure will serve her well. Our ears are numbed to shrill pleas, overly earnest sentimentality and unchecked, disingenuous enthusiasm. Merrill and her new club offer potential California voters some undoubtedly welcome, disarming simplicity: Here’s a voter registration, here’s why you should vote and here’s some information about the candidates for whom you might vote. With no frills, and no cheap thrills.

Merrill explains her decision to work in Washington: “I’ve been interested in the political circus for a while, academically. I wanted to try on Washington, see if I liked it, and see if I wanted to go back.” The experiment, as Merrill refers to it, did not provide a clear plan for the future. She does, however, plan to stay in politics, whether by “providing research, lobbying, being an aid, working on the Hill, or teaching.”

However inconclusively, Merrill portrays her Washington experience positively. The other interns, about thirty in all, offered an appealing diversity of geography and areas of interest—from science to psychology to the military, but all in the political arena. Of the thirty, many were women, and “unlike other offices,” as Merrill explained, Clinton’s office was “a comfortable area for women to be in” without all the “crude jokes.”

One senses, though, that Merrill is hitting her stride, and will find it more rewarding to do fieldwork on a current political hot topic, under the auspices of a club created with her own ideals in mind, than to complete tasks handed down to her from a Washington policy wonk. Merrill was chosen as a subject for a TSL profile due to the suspicion that work in D.C. has inspired her to make a difference in her own college community. The truth turned out to be more interesting: that Merrill probably would have been doing this whether she went to Capitol Hill or not, due to her own finely honed political acumen. Even more eagerly, we will watch where this journey takes her.