Andrew Golis

SORRY IT’S LATE! To catch up on what this series is all about, read here.

DISCLAIMER: This post is really long and self-absorbed. That’s what you get when you ask me to write about me. Also, it will be boring to people who don’t like campaigns or weren’t interested in the recent UC election.

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It’s funny because, I hated insiders. The word just sounds so… dirty. I worked for Dean, I hated Kerry. To me, insider was a synonym for selfish, ambitious, all the usual stuff. But there we were, the “insider” candidacy.

Ty and Ian had wisely played up their “outsider” status and not always in the most friendly way. Ty had made wonderfully mean-spirited posters that said “Tired of the same old trash?” with a picture of a trash can. They criticized the UC whenever possible. They railed on Mahan as an implicit attack on Glazer and Capp. For the first week, everything that Ty said was really negative. “Their website puts me to sleep,” he declared in the Crimson. (To which someone on the campaign quipped to me “If reading about student issues puts you to sleep, shouldn’t you be looking for another job?”) And my favorite, at one point, someone sent a mass facebook message for Ty and Ian saying “Don’t let the resume-padding cookie-cutter tyrants win.” Whew, that’s subtle.

It was really frustrating at first. I guess it’s hard to understand unless you know Matt and Clay well. Honest to God, I’ve never meant two more down-to-earth well-meaning guys. Suddenly (and in retrospect kind of hilariously), they were a part of this evil monolithic establishment. They were the Man. And not like “yo, you the man.” More like “I am being oppressed by the Man.” “I’m a part of an establishment?” one UC member said to me, “I just thought I was a dorky college kid who went to a meeting in Sever once a week.” So there we were, the establishment candidates, the same old trash, the cookie-cutter resume-building tyrants, the Man (with a boring website).

Originally, we thought the campaign would be about issues. Until just before the campaign, it was just us and Teo and Samita. We figured Teo would advocate for what are essentially republican ideas of making the UC all about collecting and distributing money (like George W. says “I think the American people know how to spend their money better than the government does.) He did, but no one cared.

We figured we’d run a campaign about issues. We planed on using a simple message: “because it’s your school, your money and your home.” Matt wanted to talk about the curricular review and how the administration’s mentality had to be changed. Clay wanted to talk about continuing to reform the UC’s finances and building community on the UC to make it more effective. We did all of those things, but no one cared.

When Ty got into the race we knew we had to take him seriously. He’s a nice guy with a lot of friends, and we figured the black community would be excited to see one of its own run. We knew that Mahan hadn’t taken Byrd seriously enough last year, almost until it was too late. We figured that Ty, just like Aaron, would run against the UC. So, we knew that it would be an inside-outside game if it was us and them, but we had no idea it would be so… vicious.

The moment of clarity for us was Wednesday night of the first week. We had seen Ty’s posters, it was becoming clear that he and Ian, not Teo and Samita, were the main competition. We were pretty sure (but not positive, because to the best of my memory this was still at the time when Ty didn’t have a website) that all of the campaigns were running on pretty much the same issues.

The Election Commission made a ruling, Wednesday evening, that any flyer done in which half of it advertised the debate the following night would be completely free. Upon hearing that, I got on the phone. Within about 30 minutes Greg Schmidt (our field director and brilliant design guy) was already working on designs for a door drop, I called everyone I could and emailed the staff list calling for a 12 am meeting, I had two guys to run to Kinkos for all of the copies and our rules guy talking to the Election Commission making sure we understood the rule correctly.

Over at Greg’s we discussed what we wanted the door drop to say. It had become clear that the campaign had become about insider/outsider, and that we needed to frame it for ourselves to be successful. We talked about different ideas, mini-resumes, some things nice, some things not-so-much. We talked on the phone w/ Matt and Clay who were running around between meetings and door-to-door. We decided on a simple question: “But who can actually get it done?” Below that, we included some of Matt and Clay’s experience (if my memory serves me).

At 12, about 30 people shower up in the Tonkens room in Winthrop House. We split up the houses and sent out teams. By the end of the night, every room at Harvard had a big orange sheet of paper hanging over the door box (ad for the debate facing in, of course) asking “But who can actually get it done?”

The next night at the debate, Matt hit the point hard. He kept saying “this campaign should be about who can get it done.” At the end of his closing statement, having been told he was out of time, Ty kind of half rose to his feet and defensively claimed “we can get it done!” From that moment on, and for the rest of the campaign, the insider/outsider question wasn’t just about whether or not you liked the UC, it was about who could “actually get it done.” Matt and Clay said so in all their speeches and when they went door to door.

That’s when we (and I) came to terms with being an insider.

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Was that at all interesting?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 2:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.