When the TV networks announced that President Barack Obama had clinched Ohio and won a second term on election night, many college students around the country celebrated. In Washington, D.C., a number of these young people — who were a key constituency in giving Obama a boost over GOP nominee Mitt Romney — rushed downtown to Pennsylvania Avenue and celebrated outside the White House.

The atmosphere was just as celebratory — if not more so — at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs. After all, the country chose to reelect the nation’s first African-American president, despite rough economic times, so countless watch parties were hosted on election night at these campuses.

But Harold Booker, a senior at Morehouse College, wasn’t joining in the festivities. Instead, he watched the election results from his dorm room, alone.

Booker is a rarity at an HBCU: a Republican.

“I tell people all the time, if you look at the African-American community — especially in the South — we’re very much so socially and fiscally conservative,” Booker said. “When you look at the policies of the Democratic Party, they don’t represent our families and communities, and what they need to grow and develop.”

Read more at the Huffington Post.

There is a not so recent “blueprint” released by the Obama campaign, a compilation of the president’s policies he has either said on the campaign trail or during the debates, in which he promised continued investment in education by hiring “100,000 math and science teachers.”

Big investments

Obama prioritized investment in energy and manufacturing, an industry where he promises to create 1 million jobs by creating “a new network” of 15 to 20 manufacturing innovation institutes to ensure the next generation of products are invented and manufactured here in the United States.

In addition, President Obama promised “two million workers for good jobs that actually exist through partnerships between businesses and community colleges” and an increase in jobs by “taking on China’s unfair trade practices through a new trade enforcement unit to level the playing field.”

Unemployment problem

The president said he would put “Americans back to work rebuilding roads, bridges, runways and schools here in the United States.” direct job creation would come from funds saved from ending the war in Afghanistan, which the Congressional Research Service estimated in 2011, would cost another $500 billion through 2021.

Obama and taxes

His statement, “I have said that for incomes over $250,000 a year that we should go back to the rates that we had when Bill Clinton was president,” suggest the president’s position on taxes is consistent.

Tax rates during the Clinton administration tapped out for high-income earners at 39.6 percent, which was lowered to 35 percent with the Bush-era tax cuts passed in 2001 and extended in 2011.

The president reiterated in his “Blueprint for America” that he would extend the middle-class tax cut and will cut spending by $4 trillion over the next four years.

Healthcare

After passing the Affordable Care Act, President Obama doesn’t have much of a health care plan other than to continue implementing the program. In his “Blueprint,” he promised to expand the “health reform tax credit to cover 50% of small businesses’ health care costs in 2014 and providing access to group rates, so small businesses won’t continue to pay up to 18% more than large firms for health insurance.”

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