The young man sat at a polished desk, which was covered with forms and parked incongruously just outside the door of Annie’s Cafe on East Colfax Avenue.
“Good morning,” he said. “Are you registered to vote? Do you need an absentee ballot?”
It was 8:30 a.m. Sunday and I was walking into the restaurant, a popular spot on the northern edge of Congress Park that dispenses coffee like a balm and birthright.
The young man’s name was Ben Jacoff. He wore sandals and sported a head full of black curls and a scraggly beard that was still deciding its future. Thirty minutes earlier Jacoff had lugged his desk out of the house next door that he shares with a friend, and set up his voter registration booth at the cafe door. Just like he had Saturday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
“We had 200 people fill out forms yesterday, either to register to vote or for absentee ballots,” he said. “It’s going well. I think people are fired up this year.”
Jacoff is one of thousands of young Coloradans mobilized for the Nov. 4 presidential election.
Just like pundits two and three times their age, they view the election as a watershed, perhaps the most important one in which they’ll ever cast a vote.
“There is so much riding on this,” Jacoff said. “This nation is going to right itself.”
Jacoff supports Barack Obama. Later in the day he planned to go canvassing for him. At 23, this is his second presidential election.
“I’m out here because democracy is awesome and everyone should be registered to vote,” he said. “I think the beauty of democracy is that the system doesn’t rely on any one person for the system to succeed.”
Jacoff laughed. “That’s my stupid political-science-major background talking,” he said.
He has seen a bit more of the world than many people his age. Before graduating from Minnesota’s Carleton College, Jacoff studied in Mali in northwest Africa.
“It was pretty fantastic and really whetted my appetite,” he said.
Now, with the enthusiasm and optimism that the best of his generation can still summon, Jacoff is getting ready to give back.
He has joined the Peace Corps. In December he leaves for a 27-month hitch. He hopes to work in sub-Saharan Africa, preferably as an educator. “It’s not the most lucrative of enterprises, but the Peace Corps is what you make of it,” he said. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to serve.”
After all the squandering of international goodwill this nation has witnessed in the past eight years, Jacoff wants to help make a difference, persuade at least a few people of the continued greatness of America and its potential for good. It will be one person at a time, one deed at a time.
“Our country’s position in the world is going to change, and we can’t avoid that,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean an inevitable downward spiral. It’s just that the role of superpower today is changing.”
A couple walked up. “Hi,” Jacoff said. “Are you registered to vote?”
“Yes,” the woman said, “But I’m going to need an absentee ballot.”
Jacoff handed her a form and retrieved a pen from a jelly glass.
“Knock on wood,” he said. “But I feel really optimistic about this election.”
I shook his hand and stepped into the cafe for some coffee, feeling just a bit more optimistic about this country than I had 15 minutes earlier.
William Porter writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at wporter@denverpost.com or 303-954-1977.
