Last week, the editors of the Justice did something that, to my knowledge, no Justice editor has ever done before: They entered the fray and endorsed a candidate from each of the two major political parties, just in time for the Massachusetts primary Feb. 5th.For reasons that are not clear to me, this move seems to have engendered a bit of animosity among some Brandeis students. As with many of the actions the Justice takes, formal feedback on the editorial has been disappointingly minimal. The few comments that were posted on the paper's web site, though, indicate that some students feel the editors were suffering from delusions of grandeur when they called upon Brandeis Democrats to vote for Sen. Barack Obama and Brandeis Republicans to vote for Sen. John McCain.

I could not disagree more vociferously with the anonymous posters of these comments. Indeed, my only criticism of the editorial is not that it was published, but that it wasn't published sooner, when its contents might have had a more tangible impact on the countless Brandeis students from Super Tuesday states who are registered in their home districts and needed, therefore, to vote via absentee ballots.

I might also criticize the editorial for not being more substantive in its evaluation of what an Obama or McCain presidency might mean for people under the age of 30-but more on that in a moment.

First, I call upon the two individuals who criticized the editors of the Justice-not for endorsing Obama and McCain, but for endorsing any presidential candidate at all-to consider the implications of their critique. As I sit here typing this column, the five-year anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq sits ominously on the horizon; the Canadian dollar-not the first currency to spring to mind when thinking of international monetary powerhouses-is worth more than the American dollar for the first time since I learned how to eat solid food; crude oil prices are running at about $91 a barrel-up from $37 a barrel when members of the Class of 2008 were seniors in high school; and last year, more than 2 million American families faced the prospect of losing their homes to foreclosure in the subprime lending crisis.

This is the world you all are graduating into. Any action taken by college students to encourage their peers to learn about the issues and vote is therefore laudable.

That being said, I do wish the editorial had offered a bit more guidance to students on where the candidates stand on issues that directly impact young people. Over the last two decades, the cost of a college education has increased by more than 400 percent and educational debt is preventing many graduates from entering the nonprofit and public-service sectors. What are the candidates planning to do about that? College students are no longer exempt from Selective Service obligations. Although none of the viable candidates at the time of the Super Tuesday primary had endorsed the idea of a national draft (duh.), what do the experts think their policies on America's military involvement in the Middle East might mean for the future of our "all-volunteer" armed forces?

In other words, aside from the fact that Obama and McCain have both run "clean and open" campaigns and have "striven to bridge the great divide enmeshing this country," why should Brandeis students vote for either of them? Ironically, guest editorials published in the same edition of the paper did a better job of outlining where Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee stand on specific issues.

Of course, some people might insist it is not at all surprising that the generation of voters who were in elementary and middle school when George W. Bush came to power would be focusing not on issues, but on the question of who can "restore civility, honesty and hope to a corrupted and desperate situation."

I'm not sure I know any of those people, though. I work in academe, after all.

The ombudsman serves as the readers' representative, writing a regular column evaluating the newspaper's journalistic performance. Prof. Maura Farrelly (AMST), the director of the journalism program and a former broadcast reporter for Voice of America, can be reached at farrelly@brandeis.edu.