Saxa Politica: Hot Chick/Chicken Madness 2016?

This year’s election for GUSA President and Vice President has been a melodramatic mess.

On Tuesday morning, Feb. 9 Tony Pezzullo (MSB ’17) and A.J. Serlemitsos (COL ’17) announced that they were ending their campaign for GUSA President and Vice President against Enushe Khan (MSB ‘17) and Chris Fisk (COL ‘17).

In an op-ed in The Hoya, Pezzullo said that they entered the race with the intention to “raise the campus-wide interest level in the campaign.”

“Who was going to be excited to read about an unopposed race?” he asked.

In the days since Pezzullo’s announcement, this question was asked again by Chris Grocki (SFS ‘17) and Jeff Naft (COL ‘17). The pair created a Facebook event pointedly titled “Rally Against the GUSA Establishment, Burn the Bridges that Divide Us,” a turn of the Khan/Fisk campaign slogan “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges.”

Of course, the Grocki/Naft campaign, which produced a limited, but existent platform of priorities, was short lived. The pair announced via Facebook on Feb. 10 that they were dropping out of the race, with full confidence that the Hot Chick/Chicken Madness write-in candidacy was the “anti-establishment that Georgetown needs.”

If you judge by number of people who have replied “going” to a Facebook event as the organizers of the “Two Chicks, One Georgetown” campaign have done, you might notice that as of Thursday morning, more people are planning to write-in Chick/ Madness than are actually planning on voting for Khan/Fisk. Khan/Fisk should/could/some verb here ignore this reality at their peril.

I do not actually believe that Khan/Fisk will will lose this election to two admittedly delicious sandwiches that won’t even appear on next week’s ballot. But it should be concerning to the only two humans in the race that the campus community seems to be actively searching for someone to compete with them.

Last semester, I wrote about the Paradox of Choice, the idea that having plenty of options is not always a good thing. That being said, having no choice whatsoever is by no means any better. Especially when that choice is for the people who will serve as the representatives of the student body for the next year.

GUSA is often derided as being irrelevant and inconsequential, often from students who diagnose their representatives with an overly inflated sense of self-importance and abhor the politics applied around the issues they care about. I get that.

But GUSA serves a purpose. In the last year, our current executives reached a Memorandum of Understanding with the university regarding sexual assault and made progress on a more student-centered 20-year campus plan (hear it directly from the source here). While it’s true that these things might have happened regardless of who won last year’s election, the issues they’ve made the most progress on, student safety and master planning, are the issues that students have been the most vocal about.

The next GUSA executive will do exactly what has been done by every previous executive in recent memory has done: they will make small steps to address the huge issues that the student body really cares about.

This means that we, as students, have a responsibility to tune in and figure out what those issues are. Whether that’s still master planning and student safety, or if we’re more concerned with diversity, sustainability, or the proposed changes to how we register for classes, we must be vocal.

In an average executive election season, Khan/Fisk would make for a formidable ticket. Their platform is quite comprehensive (read: lengthy) and covers everything from undocumented students to mission and ministry. That being said, like many previous campaigns before them, there are no indications yet which of the many planks of their platform Khan/Fisk would prioritize over the others. Their promise to break barriers and build bridges is certainly great rhetoric, but is equally vague.

It will be up to the student body, then, to determine how the candidates will handle their year in office. Read Khan and Fisk’s platform. Attend the Town Hall. Be vocal about the issues you think are important. As much as I love a Hot Chick with barbecue sauce, I don’t want to have to trust it to govern.