Obama vs Romney Made Me Miss Law School

The Presidential debates inspire nostalgia.

I am occasionally asked by well meaning people (younger than me) (and mostly liberal arts majors) if going to law school is a good idea. This usually contributes to a lost day of work while I contemplate the pros and cons of one of the bigger decisions I made. I compose a three thousand word email that concludes with a very ambiguous answer that translates into: well, that depends. (Even my short answers include extra words). (And parenthesis).

And yet, tonight as I watched the debate between President Obama and Governor Romney, I remembered just how much damn fun law school was. I started law school in September 2004 at the University of Texas (the Harvard of Texas law schools). You may recall there was an election that year. Exactly eight years ago (yes eight years, I can’t believe it either) the sitting President was running against a wishy washy rich guy from Massachusetts.

I honestly do not recall who “won” the debates. There was no Twitter for real-time scoring (though Big Bird went unscathed). What I do remember is the election was close and people cared. There is a perception among conservatives that law schools are inherently liberal places. I always thought this odd given how many of my classmates (and myself) went to law school so they could make a lot of money (this turned out to be a dubious undertaking for many [or most?] of us). My own experience was that it was actually a pretty divided political spectrum, at least amongst the students.

How — you might wonder — did I know people cared? Because we had multiple giant Presidential Debate WATCH PARTIES…in public. Yes. On a nerd scale from 1 — you have read all the Harry Potter books more than once — to 10 — you have a framed picture of Warren G. Harding somewhere in your apartment because obviously you would live in small apartment if you owned a framed picture of WGH — going to a Presidential Debate watch party in October of 2004 was an 11. It’s one nerdier. I could not have been happier. Austin is rightfully viewed as a bastion of Texas liberalism but when you are at a bar three blocks from where the sitting President was the sitting governor four years earlier the crowd is much more Ohio’an than you might expect.

I doubt very many of my classmates remember this but the big official watch party of the University of Texas Class of 2007 in October 2004 was at the Fox and Hound on Fourth Street. Spoiler alert: the bar went the way of the Kerry campaign (I would like to point out that Yelp still has three reviews for it and one of them is from someone who attended a “gathering” for the sci-fi magazine Space Squid and only awarded it three stars because it was too “sporty”).

I remember those debates because it was the first time in my life where I was surrounded by people of both parties in a public setting. People yelled and cheered for a political event the way they do at football games. Believe it or not the crowd was as divided as one for Texas-OU at the Cotton Bowl — which I attended for the first time the following year when Texas finally beat OU by approximately 100 points. My memory recalls that Kerry made Bush look so stupid he considered conceding the race. History notes Bush actually beat Kerry pretty decisively. While the debates were fun to watch they didn’t actually matter all that much except — and this is important — as a way of feeling as though you were part of the process.

My vote in Texas didn’t matter any more that year than it will this year. But yelling at a television. Reading funny tweets. Arguing on Facebook. It doesn’t matter. Yet it totally does. Yes, really. It’s what makes us feel like someone is listening even if Jim Leher never uses any of our questions, two of your twelve Twitter followers unfollow you, and 95% of your Facebook “friends” never see your clever status update because they blocked your newsfeed when Sarah Palin was nominated for Vice-President.

Tonight I watched the debate with a married couple who met in law school. They were part of the same class of 2007 I was (with far more luck romantically than me it turns out). We drank wine, watched the debates, and laughed at their dogs’ bow-ties. Tucker Carlson would have been delighted. There was still TV yelling and the TV had many more pixels than 2004, but it was nothing like that crowded bar in Austin. I was in bed an hour after it ended.

I wrote all of this down so that the next time someone asks me if they should go to law school I can just forward them the link to this article and say to them…”well that depends.” It depends on if you want to have a hell of a lot of fun with a big group of nerds who will stay your friends for a very long time.