“I would never whore myself out,” Tim Brown (COL ’09), one of the eight candidates for GUSA, said.
“That’s a campaign promise,” Brown added. “That might be my only campaign promise.”
This year’s field of candidates for the GUSA presidency is uncommonly crowded, with twice as many candidates running as last year, several of whom have little or no GUSA experience. Schuyler Hawkins (COL ‘10) and Anna Schubert (COL ‘09), who are both members of Georgetown Emergency Response Medical Service, said they consider their lack of experience with Georgetown’s student government a strength.
“If you’ve been doing [GUSA] long enough, you become disillusioned,” Schubert, who is running as Hawkins’ vice-president, said. “I think we would be a breath of fresh air to the system.”
In addition to flyering, the GERMS duo, who have only spent about half of the $200 allowed for campaign expenses, will be baking cookies in various common rooms around campus over the next week, in an effort to meet and talk one-on-one with students.
Most of the candidates are using similar tactics to meet voters; almost all said they would be campaigning door-to-door.
Either Tom Karwacki (MSB ’09) or his running mate, William Farrar (COL ‘09) will be dressed in a gorilla costume when they canvass the campus.
“No one is going to out-gimmick us,” Karwacki, who plans to deliver singing telegrams to girls today and play Beirut in Red Square tomorrow, said.
Comfortable with being labeled the “joke” candidate, Karwacki said he’s not optimistic about winning, but that his campaign should at least serve one purpose: by taking the gimmicks off the table, the other candidates would have to win on the merit of their issues.
While the candidates all hav their pet projects, their platforms vary little on major issues: almost everyone wants more safety, campus-wide wireless, better food at Leo’s, and a more lenient alcohol policy. Kyle Williams (COL ‘09) and his running mate Brian Kesten (COL ‘10) claim their experience is “one thing we can boast that the other candidates can’t.”
Williams, who has been involved with Campus Ministry, said he didn’t run last year because he wanted to get more experience as a member of current GUSA president Ben Shaw’s (COL ‘08) programming board, in order to better understand “the monster that GUSA is, in trying to get things passed and get things done.”
Kesten, who has been a GUSA senator since his freshman fall, has a list of 40 University administrators that he knows, about two-thirds of whom he’s on a first-name basis with.
Pat Dowd (SFS ‘09) and James Kelly (COL ‘09) are, like Shaw and his vice-president Matt Appenfeller (COL ‘08), both transfer students, from Notre Dame and George Washington University, respectively. Dowd said he became seriously interested in running after his involvement with the alcohol policy working groups.
Many of the candidates’ campaign slogans—David Dietz (COL ‘10) and Tyler Stone’s (SFS ‘09) “Own It,” D.W. Cartier (COL ‘09) and Andrew Rugg’s (COL ‘09) “Saxaback” and Brown and Dale Sevin’s (SFS ’09) “Your Voice, Your Dreams, Your Georgetown”—touch on bringing the Georgetown experience back to its students. In the wake of the new alcohol policy and bias-related incidents from last semester, the candidates talk of bridging the gap between the University administration and students as well as making GUSA more visible and accountable to its constituents.
“If [the students] could feel something about GUSA, I think we could get stuff done,” Cartier said.
Despite their similarities, the tickets have some variations in their smaller goals. Sean Hayes (MSB ‘10) and Andrew Madorsky (MSB ‘10) want to bring more unifying events like homecoming or Run for Rigby to campus; Dowd and Kelly plan to institute a “bring your professor to Leo’s” program; and Brown and Sevin want to extend the referendum process used in last year’s keg-ban controversy to any new policy changes the University might entertain in the future.
In the wake of Shaw and Appenfeller’s popular YoutTube campaign video “Vote in a Box”—modeled after Saturday Night Live’s “Dick in a Box” skit—all of the campaigns are scrambling to get humorous videos shot, edited and online.
“It’s hard running the election year after ‘Vote in a Box’ came out,” Cartier said. His video, “Saxaback,” made to the tune of Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” dubbed with Cartier’s Georgetown-specific lyrics, was the first to go up on YouTube only to be the first taken down a few days later. Parts of the video used unauthorized shots of Cartier and Rugg at Vital Vittles and with Jack the Bulldog. Neither Vital Vittles’ management nor Fr. Steck, who spoke for Jack, wanted it to seem like they were endorsing a particular candidate, and so election commissioner Maura Cassidy (COL ‘08) asked the pair to take their video down.
Unfazed, Cartier said a new “Saxaback,” with the controversial scenes edited or taken out, will be back up on youtube again at some point during the campaign.
So far, the Dietz and Brown tickets have posted videos, with promises of more to come. Most of the other candidates plan to have their first or only videos up by the end of the week.
“Our video will get some laughs for sure,” Kelly said. The pair was otherwise tight-lipped about their video, which is slated to come out at the end of the week.
Shaw maintains that he will not comment on the campaign, but former GUSA president Twister Murchison (SFS ‘08) said that he is not impressed with this year’s campaign.
“People are not campaigning as hard as they should be,” Murchison said. “You can’t blame the weather. It was snowing outside when I ran.”
