Les temps perdu: Snow job

I had a friend in college named Dennis who told me one day that he had decided he wanted to be student body president. He might as well have told me he wanted to bounce on his head across the quad until his spleen turned into a watermelon. Student government was about as useful as, well, a splenetic watermelon. Student government was absolutely powerless, and its number tended to draw from the ranks of the terminally dull. You imagined frat boys and sorority girls with sweaters tied around their necks and sunglasses propped up on the tops of their heads and a life ahead of them full of martinis, country clubs, nasty divorces and dinner parties with the other bank vice officers. Why would anybody want to be student body president?

“You get free housing in the student government building,” my friend Dennis explained.

I understood immediately. It had nothing whatsoever to do with student government. It was all about the perks.

It became the job of a small group of Dennis’s friends and associates to get Dennis elected to student government. None of us really cared much, aside from wanting our buddy to have a place to sleep for free, but there is something about a challenge that has amazing appeal. We considered ourselves as smart as can be, so why couldn’t we get him elected? All we had to do was figure out how to run a political campaign, and then run it. How hard could that be?

It turned out that our opponent was not cut from the country club cloth after all, the stereotype that probably had little basis aside from bad Fifties TV shows, but was instead one of those really political type of guys who knows everything that’s going on in the Beltway and wants to be either president of the United States some day or the assassin of the president of the United States some day, depending on how radical his politics remained over time. In other words, a Leftie from the get-go who would win the Trotsky look-alike contest without even bothering to add an ice axe. When he looked at the student body presidency, he saw a chance to make a difference in the way the university was run, not free housing. We thought he was nuts. Nobody had ever made a difference in student government. Now this guy and his team of likeminded anarchists was going to change the world? We didn’t think so.

The game was on.

Despite the fact that student government politics was mostly imaginary, student government campaigning very much existed in the real world. The candidates had to promote themselves, give speeches, even debate. Dennis’s last name was deSnoo, so we came up with tee shirts that said “deSnoo job.” There were those among us who suggested that this might not come off as serious enough, but the heads of the operation could only play the game so far. In fact, it didn’t take long before there were quite a lot of us who, as far as I know, had not been attached to us before. What started out as a band of friends quickly acquired all sorts of fellow travelers. Presumably they supported Dennis because of his politics. I didn’t even know he had any politics, aside from the general left-leaning, anti-Nixon, end-the-Vietnam-War sentiments that were pretty common on college campuses, and he was certainly not the radical his opponent was. He was a likeable guy, though, and he attracted followers. Which was good, because a campaign needs warm bodies. A handful of pipe dreamers were not enough to make it happen.

We played the game for real, for the most part. I became the classic war room guy, monitoring the campaign from afar, tracking the candidate as he moved from place to place speechifying and whatnot, keeping an eye on activities where he should show up because it would look good if he showed up there, even if he had no previous interest in the undertaking at that particular place. It didn’t last long, and it felt like a real political campaign. It culminated in a debate, and this being 1970, the issue of what we should do about the Vietnam War and what seemed to be going on in Cambodia came up, and our opponent was full of ideas and Dennis was of the persuasion that it was unlikely that the Syracuse University student government would be pulled into it one way or another. Student government should stick to student government and be realistic, was the thrust of his argument.

All the play-acting in the world wasn’t going to win the election and get Dennis that free housing. So we had an ace in the hole. Simply put, just about everybody we knew thought student government was a farce, and had no intention all of a sudden to start voting. So in the stretch, we went out and made personal appeals to all of our friends, explaining that we agreed with them, and we knew they didn’t give a rat’s heinie about SG, but, as friends, would they do it? For us? They’d be on the campus that day anyhow. Just drop in and vote. It’ll take two minutes. Do it for me. Please.

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but as I do recollect it, what made the difference were those personal pleas. Dennis got plenty of votes from the hoi and the polloi, but it was the friends who said What the hey that made the difference.

He got his free housing.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. It turned out that his opponent had been pretty wise about the way of politics, and before we knew it, there was a general strike at the school because of Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia, the same strike that hit campuses around the country. Things weren’t terribly tense for us, and the administration handled it well, but the next thing we knew, we were in the middle of it, manning barricades that had arisen virtually overnight. I spent a bunch of time driving the student government van around making announcements (there was a pair of loudspeakers on the top until I drove under a tree that hung a little lower than I had estimated) and providing coffee and doughnuts to the protestors. Our erstwhile opponent was one of the leaders of the strike. What can I say?

Things quieted down eventually, and there were a couple of perks for yours truly from all of this. Included in the political spoils was a sinecure that I was neatly eased into, making a few bucks for simply showing up once in a while to represent SG on some committee or other. I also took over a record coop business, which is a story in and of itself. Best of all, I got to run a campus festival for a week, another self-contained story. But ultimately I was unimpressed by the whole political side of things. Not so Dennis and a bunch of my other friends. After college they went off into real campaigns, and a couple of them became professional campaign managers, the kind that couldn’t just ask their friends to vote for their other friends, but who had to win real votes with, well, whatever it is that politicians win votes with.

For me, aside from the financial benefit, the best thing to come out of it was to be able to say that I had been involved in the campaign and in the running of student government when it came time for me to head out into the world and apply for jobs. It looked really good on paper, and was probably about the only thing I had to report on my resume from my college years aside from going to classes like everybody else. It didn’t get me a job, as far as I know, but it didn’t hurt.