It was the starkest contrast of the webcast debate and the one area where U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano clearly differentiated himself from the rest of the field running for US Senate.
No, the six-term congressman said, he would not support a move to lower the voting age, a stance opposite his three Democratic primary opponents.
But before completely dismissing the issue and Capuano’s response as frivolous, bear in mind the context of the question and who the former Somerville mayor’s constituency is. The question came from one of the three student panelists at the debate that was jointly sponsored by the Boston Herald and Suffolk University and held at the Suffolk University Law School. The audience was predominantly Suffolk students and the morning debate was shown on the Internet, where it is presumed the majority of viewers and commenters would be the under-30 crowd.
On top of that, Capuano’s district is, by his own measurement, the leader among congressional districts in the country with higher education institutes. There are 34 four-year, degree-awarding colleges and universities in the 8th Congressional district, making Capuano’s stance somewhat contrarian to his constituents.
His district also includes Cambridge, the only city or town in Massachusetts that allows 17-year-olds to vote in local elections.
(The four candidates are running in to the special US Senate election to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy, with the Democratic primary on December 8. CW Unbound queried the candidates on 15 topics and received responses from all but Coakley. We posted their answers starting with the first query — “What would be the first bill you’d like to file as a US senator?” — and continuing with questions on education, foreign policy, and domestic issues. There are two televised debates this week, on Tuesday at 7 p.m. on WCVB-TV and on Wednesday at 7 p.m. on NECN.)
Attorney General Martha Coakley, the frontrunner in virtually every poll, said she’d be open to dropping the voting age to 17 as a way to get more young people involved in the democratic process while businessman and Boston Celtics’ co-owner Stephen Pagliuca said he’d support the reduced age, especially this year with a 17-year-old son whose vote he could then count on.
City Year founder Alan Khazei unsurprisingly, given his involvement with youth volunteers, endorsed the question. He sounded like he’d even be in favor of 7-year-olds casting ballots, detailing his daughter’s elementary school efforts to garner support for dad and an exit poll she ran last year at the age of six correctly predicting then-candidate Barack Obama’s victory margin in Massachusetts.
The effort is not new. According to the National Youth Rights Association, 12 states allow teens to vote in primaries at the age of 17 if they will turn 18 before the general election. A number of states have debated legislation that would lower the voting age to 16 and lawmakers in Texas and California have even tried to get bills passed lowering the age to 14. Some countries, including Austria, Brazil, Germany, and Israel, allow teens as young as 16 to vote in national or local elections.
With the questions coming from college students and the audience demographics on the youthful side, most of the questions focused on their generation’s job prospects and college affordability. Even issues such as health insurance and the nation’s debt were geared toward finding solutions for this group of voters.
All four candidates bemoaned the spiraling cost of college. Coakley vowed to bring her experience with predatory mortgage lenders to bear on predatory student loan institutes, while Khazei promised to push legislation that would pay the equivalent of a year’s tuition, fees, and books in exchange for each year of service performed by a student in a volunteer program but did not offer a figure for cost. He said the amount would start at about $10,000, the current annual figure, and would rise accordingly with rates.
According to the College Board, the average annual tuition of a four-year public college is $7,020 plus room and board, fees and books, bringing the total to more than $15,200. For private schools, the average tuition is $18,548 per year and the total cost is more than $26,700.
Pagliuca said he would push to raise the maximum for Pell Grants, which he said covered roughly 70 percent of the cost of school when he went to Duke University in the 1970s. Now, he said, Pell Grants, which now are maxed out at $5,350, cover about 40 percent. But the College Board said the grants will only cover about 35 percent of the public school cost while paying for less than 15 percent of the private school.
Capuano brought some personal perspective to the issue when he talked about his son who graduated from Suffolk two years ago with $150,000 in debt. Greg Gatlin, a spokesman for Suffolk, declined to comment on Capuano’s claim or anything about a student’s personal financial situation.
Capuano’s spokesman did not return a call for comment, so it’s unclear when his son attended Suffolk — whether it was for undergraduate, law school or both. If the younger Capuano attended Suffolk undergrad and estimating he entered in the 2000-2001 school year, tuition was $15,538. If he then entered the law school after graduation, the tuition for 2004-2005 was $29,200. So all seven years could have rung up $150,000 debt.
According to the College Board, that far exceeds the average burden for graduating students. The median debt for students with bachelor’s degrees was $11,000 and of those who graduated from private schools, only 24 percent borrowed more than $40,000.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the debate was what wasn’t said. No one brought up the name of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy or tried to wrest his mantle until 50 minutes into the one-hour debate. Khazei pointed out the youth service bill is named after the late senator.
No one else mentioned the man they are all trying to replace, and that may have been the biggest nod to the audience — who have nowhere near the allegiance to the Kennedy name that their parents and grandparents did.
