How not to run for Student Body President

The BBQ Pit
1

Brief Intro: Student Government (SG) elections are this week, April 17-19. Less than five thousand people voted in last year’s election, which was won by a non-student (don’t even get me started). So, in other words, votes count. Without further adieu, here are some ways not to convince me to vote for you, Candidate B:

  1. Don’t say things like “Their heads are up their asses over there in Student Government”. Getting everyone you’re hoping to work with next year to hate you: not a good idea. Furthermore, antagonizing substantial parts of the student body: not a good thing. Every vote counts—literally. If you lose 50 would-be votes because you say something like this, and those 50 people end up voting for the guy you lose to, that’s a 100-vote swing. And even if there are people who end up voting for people other than you because of that comment, that’s still votes you’re losing. Bad idea. You LIKE votes. Don’t work to lose them by saying this sort of thing.

  2. If you’re going to argue that many organizations are in favor of something, don’t then go and list four. There are several HUNDRED organizations on campus. Four out of seven hundred is not even in the same time zone as convincing.

  3. If you say you’re suing someone, don’t go and indicate you’ve won already. Remember that little, tiny phrase “innocent until proven guilty”? You just went and did something that SO won’t help your case or make your face a sympathetic one come election day. And the newspaper you sued, which so far as I can see did nothing wrong, is staffed by students of this very university at which you hope to preside as SG President. There are something like 20 staff members. 20 staff members multiplied by ten friends each is 220 votes you just lost. You’re losing already.

  4. Don’t dramatize to the point of it being ridiculous: “When running away from a murderer on a rape trail on campus, you find that the nearest call box turns out to be nonfunctional and has a sign on it that simply says, “KEEP RUNNING!” I don’t think I have to point out to you the obvious idiocy in this.

  5. Don’t antagonize people you hope to be working with. Yes, I know this was also #1, but come on . . . “Student Government [SG] is full of megalomaniac idiots” is not something you want voters to have in their heads when election day comes (and it’s here). There are over 20 student senators. Saying there are two who aren’t idiots means you still have 18 to account for. And I can pretty much guarantee you, knowing several of those “megalomaniac idiots” that neither they nor their friends are going to vote for you. Given 18 senators and an incredibly shallow ten friends per senator, that’s roughly 200 votes you just lost. And their friends have friends, and so on. Remember, you want to get people to like you, not to think you’re an arrogant fuck. So that’s a conservative 420 votes you’ve lost. You do know that you’re supposed to GET votes, not lose them, right?

  6. Read before you print. If you’re saying people are idiots, and you’re trying to get elected their leader, what does that say about you? And if voters like you, why would they put you to work (for no pay) with those idiots? Makes very little sense.

  7. You’ve discussed things that are wrong with the school . . . well, actually, you haven’t done much of that. You’ve dramatized (to the point that it made you look like a drama queen) about an issue that’s already being worked on. You’ve attacked the SG members without citing much they’ve actually done. You’ve said they have their heads up their asses, that they’re megalomaniac idiots, and that they sit on their asses. This has nothing to do with anything. But THEN you go on to talk about issues NOBODY else is talking about. Present solutions or don’t waste your time and money.

  8. You want people to respect you? Put together a respectable, cogent draft on why I should vote for you. Bother with tiny things like how it looks, how easy it is to read (especially the URL for voting), and those niceities like spelling and grammar and semantics and punctuation. Yeah, I know, a little nitpicky, but you’ll notice other candidates doing just that. Hell, pay a friend of yours to do it, I don’t care.

  9. Don’t take credit for things you didn’t do. For example, if you say “I got MTV to come to our campus as part of their ‘MTV Campus Invasion’”, that better fucking be true. ‘Cause if it isn’t that’s going to look REALLY bad. And since it isn’t true, and that’s one of the last things people find out before elections, that’s going to be in their heads. They’re going to remember who lied to them to try and get votes. And given that some of them didn’t particularly give a flying goat’s ass if MTV came or not so long as they were relatively quiet and such, it can only be a bad thing if shit flies. I, for one, was annoyed by MTV’s presence, so whoever got MTV here annoyed me. And you saying you did, when you weren’t solely responsible, pisses me off. The fact that you claimed it was you and it turned out not to be your sole effort makes you look like a pile of lying shit.

So, to recap: don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a moron. Don’t antagonize your voters. Don’t insult the people you’re hoping you’re going to work with, who OH BY THE WAY happen to be voters as well! Don’t lie; don’t lie and get caught. Don’t be such a negative fuck; suggest ways to improve instead of talking about how things are so bad. You aren’t leading a revolution, you’re trying to earn a spot as president of my school. Pay attention to the little things; they can come back and bite you in the ass later on.

I swear, the morons at my school . . .

2

I remember one year at college a fringe candidate (named “Zox”) ran on the campaign slogan “A Vote for Zox is a Vote for Zox!” . He came in second. As a write-in candidate. With a field of six on the ballot. Heck, I voted for him. Weird guy, but at least you knew he wasn’t a megalomaniacal fuckwit.

3

Sounds like this person should adopt the tactics my roommate used when he ran for student body president a few years ago: the twin strategies of apathy and evasion.

He “campaigned”, and I use the term VERY loosely, on a platform of ‘who gives a rat’s ass about student govt’ (not unlike the movie Election - only a few years before it came out). To that end, he vowed not to spend a dime on campaigning, shunned most debates, forums, etc., and in general did absolutely nothing to further his bid for the presidency, except a few interviews with the student paper in which he explained that he was running because he thought he deserved a tuition waiver more than the other guys (the student body president gets one as compensation for their service). His running mate was sick with pneumonia for most of it, and IIRC she made not a single public statement or appearance during the campaign.

The remarkable thing is that in spite of this, they still managed to finish second with nearly 25% of the vote against the establishment machine candidates, poli-sci majors who’d been slaving away in student govt their entire college careers. And this was at a 25,000-student university, too.

4

Is this all one person, iamphuna? If so, sounds like they shouldn’t even be at university. If it’s an assortment of candidates, well, it’s sad to think that at least one of them might end up holding office after all. (Remember, not everyone has a steel-trap memory about these things; they may vote for one of these people based on something in their campaign that did ring true.)

It’s not the same as government, but when I was a HS senior, an acquaintance of mine (Gallant) was one of five candidates for homecoming king. Among the other four was a guy (Goofus) who’d been popular earlier on, but was now on thin ice with most members of our class due to his pretension and uppity manner. During his campaign, Gallant told people, “You don’t have to vote for me; just don’t vote for Goofus.” Gallant won.

5

I have never liked the idea of student government. More specifically, I did not like political wannabes taking my money to support their hobby of claiming to speak on my behalf.

The worst example of this sort of thing was at the school I most recently attended, where my department’s student government raised the student government fees foisted upon the students to compensate for $10,000 that had mysteriously gone missing from the cash box in their locked office.

Even the best student govenments at the schools which I have attended (I have four degrees) never did much which I considered necessary. I much rather would have preferred to keep my fees, for it was money lost at a time when money was tight (one year living on the street through a Canadian winter, and another year changing universitities due to lack of funds).

I always found the faculty and administration to be open to discussion and receptive to ideas within the constraints in which they had to function. Essentially they were on the same side, but had their hands tied financially. There was no need for an adversarial student body, but at each and every university I attended, the student body was adversarial, making mountains out of mole hills, and failing to work together constructively within their own student government and externally with the faculty and administration.

My general impression was that for the most part, student body leaders were young adults with large egos and polarized ideals wanting to play at politics. To me they were embuggerances.

6

As unbelievable as it seems, Rilch, this is all one candidate. And what’s even more amusing, on a sidenote, is that the “official” GMU newspaper published an article about how this guy is suing the other newspaper for defamation of character basically for telling the truth.

The interesting part is that the article in the “official” newspaper basically says “Yup, he’s suing them. And here’s a bunch of stuff from the other article, in case you didn’t read it.”

Elections ended on the 19th. I’ll keep y’all posted.

7

Student government: the real struggle for imaginary power.

8

Freshman year me and my roommate won Hall Pres and VP (I was the VP) with slogans like “At least they’re not girls” (all the other tickets were) and I LIKE MIKE [sup] and Jim, too[/sup]. We did absoulutely nothing, 'cept get drunk at “meetings” with RA’s held at the Cat’s Eye.

4 years later (during my second Jr year) we won Arts and Science college Pres and VP in a similar fashion. At least this time we actaully did take it a little serious, and did get some things done. And I got a killer Letter of Rec. from the Dean. Plus I got to give a speach in front 10k people. All my friends were impressed that I could actually end a sentence without “and put it on my tab”.

Ahhh the joys of attendig a reasonable small, generally apatehic school.

9

How did a non-student win? That is what I want to know.

10

Can’t speak on the school in question, but for most of the universities which I attended, the student pres was a full time paid position which permitted the student pres to take a year off from being a student and devote full attention to the position.

11

How a non-student won . . . oh, how to explain.

Let’s begin with a few basic premises: we have a student who is not in the best of financial situations. Her father has cancer and she’s been paying for classes rather late the past term or so.

Now, she begins the Spring term of 1999 and doesn’t pay for her classes, which the financial people expected because from what I’ve read they had a deal with her. However, at time point before elections (and it was far enough before them that she could have withdrawn from the race comfortably) she withdrew from all her classes. My suspicion (and it’s backed up with other facts, but I haven’t heard the whole of the story) is that she didn’t have the cash but wanted to look like she was still a student.

Now, non-students (not surprisingly) are not allowed to run for student body president. And there’s a person (SG adviser) one of whose duties is to make sure everyone’s legit. Now, for whatever reason that person either didn’t check or didn’t report the facts.

Jump to April 20 or so, when we find out who the newly-elected student body president is. Now, let’s ignore the fact that this president-elect had already stolen several thousand dollars from the school and suspicions of ballotbox-stuffing were abound (and valid, as it turned out). Meanwhile, the newspaper I work for now (but didn’t then) uncovers a key fact: the person who had won the election was not a student at the time of the election or even for significant parts of the race.

At this point we also have a Student Government working with . . . let’s say two different versions of the constitution. And this is a partisan SG, so you can take that to mean that there were two camps, essentially, and neither of them was budging.

Meanwhile, faculty and such in the SG office still hadn’t gotten the clue and they weren’t talking to anyone about it. And once you got past the humor level of it (if you weren’t part of the other guy’s camp), it was kinda pathetic . . . a non-student was president (or rather, had been voted president) of a school she wasn’t attending.

Bickering continued for several months (into November, as it ended up) until the one guy who really had a claim to the presidency relinquished that claim because he was tired of all the fighting and how stupid the SG looked. So he stepped down and became a senator in the SG and the vice-president of the “ex”-president was sworn in. Still mighty fucked up, if you ask me. You didn’t, but oh well.

And there are other peripheral things I’m leaving out, like how this candidate used tactics like “Or you could just vote Muslim” and such . . . ick.

So that, in a nutshell (we’re talking summary of several months of information from multiple sides, and I don’t know that it’ll ever fully be resolved), is how a non-student got elected president of a school where she was going to class but neither paying for said classes nor registered for said classes.

::breathes::

If you want more on this feel free to email me or something and I’ll try to get to it some time this week:-)

12

You have reaffirmed my opinion of student government.

13

An epilogue to all of this:

Candidate A, who I voted for, is the one who lost the election last year to a non-student. He won this year by 8 votes.

Candidate C, the fuckwad subject of the OP, got 300-some votes. This looks pathetic at a school of 24,000, but remember only about (only, I know:)) 17,000 of those are here. Plus there were 2400 votes cast. Evidently very few people cared.

So Candidate A got 611 votes and Candidate C lost by 300 or so.

14

I think the main lesson to be learned here is that if you are ever to run for a student body position, NEVER at any point refer to yourself as anything BUT Candidate A. Nobody likes Candidates B and C, because their just not Candidate A. Candidate A makes you think of success, and being number 1. B and C are mediocrity personified.

Personally, I won my dorm election on the slogan:

Connor & O’Kane:
Because O’Kane’s mom is hot.

15

If anyone cares…
I served for two years in my college’s Student Government. Must be we were the exception to the rule. I was the Student Trustee the first year. I attended every single meeting (both SGA and Trustee meetings), prepared speeches when needed regarding student issues, served on many comittees, and helped award scholarships. All of our money was accounted for (to the penny) at all times. We took trips only when there was a need, and the furthest I ever traveled on SGA funds was to Albany. I met with Senators and Legistlators frequently to beg for money for the school. I also always asked student opinions prior to casting a vote on issues that impacted them. If a student had a major issue to be brought before the board, I prepared the arguement and presented it.

The second year I was SGA president. Again, the SGA ran beautifully. Every meeting was held using full parlimentary procedure, which all members were required to learn and follow, all money was accouted for, and issues were resolved as quickly as possible. We were the student’s best advocate when a problem arose.

Reading stories like this make me feel very proud to have participated in a government as organized and productive as ours. How do the administrators (assuming you must have a faculty member oversee the government, as ours did) let that go on? At our school, we worked VERY closely with the college Presient and VPs. I can’t imagine how we could have pulled that kind of crap and not been ousted. My position as President was paid, (well) and I was expected to do a lot of work for it.

Zette