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Day Fourteen — The final push

Even from a distance, you can never miss David Basu Roy's boots

As I re-read it at 4:17 this morning, I’ve realized that this particular edition of Blog the Vote is rather ranty. Fair warning — thin-skinned individuals should tread carefully.

But you can excuse me — we’re all getting to the ends of our respective leashes, aren’t we?

Maybe it would be different if there were more candidates or a more uncertain race, but this whole thing has just gotten so tedious the last few days. Even when talking to the candidates, they’ve all told me in one way or another that they’d like to pull off one last campaign stunt before the voting period but that they just can’t find the motivation.

Assuming they’re being truthful, I just can’t blame them. Anyone who is going to care about this thing has already gotten involved in some fashion. The rest are tuning it out and getting on with their lives. So why bother doing anything dramatic when you can simply do a traditional push on Monday and rally the troops you have.

And that’s not to say the candidates are getting lazy. No, quite the contrary.

Props to Andrew Forgione — or one of his 17 campaign managers — for keeping his blog updated. Respect to Omid Salari for frequently commenting on this blog and engaging voters through nontraditional forums. Big ups to David Basu Roy for not only making regular appearances at Rick McGhie’s but staying late as well, engaging voters until the bitter end.

No, this is just to say that the campaign has taken on a different form in the last few days. A less flashy, showy, gimmicky form. Instead it’s a more grounded, realistic, laid back form. And it’s that trend that truly endears me to these three. They’re not egomaniacs. They’re good people and they know how to read the campus climate.

So on this the final day before voting begins — the final push as they call it — don’t look for anything too surprising.

Wouldn’t be a Blog the Vote entry without hatin’ on debatin’

The debates are over. Done. Finito.

Personally, I appreciate that because I don’t have to go to them anymore. But I think the candidates also appreciate it because they were getting rather redundant by the end of the week. In the span of 24 hours on Thursday and Friday there were three presidential debates, two of which were held in the same building and three of which were all attended by the same people. I get that Politically Incorrect and the media forum are traditions and it’s been done this way for years. But I love nothing more than to dispose of traditions that are silly, cumbersome and a nuisance. Traditions needn’t still be enacted because ‘it’s been that way forever, why would you ever change it?’

So maybe next year we can ditch one or two of the debates and let the candidates actually, you know, campaign. I’m sure all three of them would have appreciated more time to get around campus and actually speak to constituents instead of spending much of their time dancing through a mine field of ornery USC questions asked by voters who already have their minds made up.

That said, the two best debates were by far Thursday night’s Real USC Presidential Debate and Friday’s media forum. That’s likely because they both afforded the candidates opportunities to go after each other which is where we saw some of the most interesting moments of the campaign period.

Just take Friday, for instance. Forgione was visibly frustrated with Salari’s constant interruptions. Salari called an audience member drunk. And Basu Roy landed one of the better quips of the campaign, responding to Salari’s assertion that all you need to do to earn a good grade is attend class and do homework by saying: “And so the ethics student meets the engineering student.”

That was pretty good.

But that also reflected a certain unruliness that was present in Friday’s debate which was likely because the candidates were given free rein to jump on each other with no semblance of order. Moderator Dan Moulton had it right Thursday night, asking the candidates to raise a hand when they wished to rebut. This is still a political debate — not a professional wrestling podcast.

The best forum for a USC presidential debate is somewhere in between the uptight, over-controlled question and answer sessions we saw earlier in the campaign period and the lawlessness of Friday’s media forum. Thursday night’s Real USC Presidential Debate was the closest and Adam Fearnall, Dan Moulton and the rest of the affiliates team that helped organize it deserve some serious kudos.

Those pompous knobs at the Gazette

I think my man StuartAtGazette put it best Friday when David Basu Roy answered a question about why campus media wasn’t involved in his platform:

Win.

To whoever the loons are that keep asking why the candidates didn’t put anything about campus media in their platforms — please stop. You’re not helping.

In fact, the candidates not including campus media in their platforms is a tremendous endorsement of the quality of the Gazette, CHRW and Big Purple Couch.

This has been a great year for us media types at Western. There isn’t one entity within campus media which is of poor quality, irrelevant or widely ignored by students. That’s something we couldn’t say that at this time last year.

And here’s the thing — this crop of presidential candidates is actually exceedingly bright. Know why? Because they were smart enough to leave us out of their platforms.

Every year some wisenheimer candidate has a great idea about writing a ‘from the desk of the president’ column in the Gazette or e-mailing the Gazette to students every day or some other such nonsense. None of it ever happens. Unless we take the candidate’s e-mail subscription idea and achieve it in five minutes while having our morning coffee to prove a point like we did last year.

I won’t speak for the other media outlets because I don’t know enough about them — of course, they both do a fantastic job and have their own forums to pump their tires — but I can speak for the Gazette which is the nation’s largest and only daily campus newspaper. Literally the only student-run newspaper in the country that does what we do. Why is the USC not more proud of that?

We are circulated 11,000 times daily and we get countless thousands more hits online. That’s not to mention the fact our videos are the most viewed campus media videos at Western by a mile and three of our editors were recently listed among the best emerging journalists in Canada.

We are not just a good student newspaper ­— we are exemplary. We love our friends at The Ubyssey and The Eyeopener and especially the Ryerson Review of Journalism which puts out some of the best student-penned features you will ever read. But the experience of working at a daily newspaper like the Gazette is unmatched on any other campus in the country.

So punk, what exactly would you like the USC presidential candidates to tell us to do?

Odds and ends

• My man Pat Searle proves Arden Zwelling isn’t the only guy who can go on for an obscenely long amount of time about an election no one cares about, with this colossal edition of Fuss on the Bus. There are 48 action-packed minutes of USC elections coverage in there so make sure you have a comfortable seat. As someone who watched the whole thing, I can tell ya it’s worth every minute.
• Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood — who is refreshingly un-MIT in person — has been checking in over at the MIT Zine blog with this report from when the presidential candidates spoke to the MITSC and these impressions from the Real USC Presidential Debate Thursday evening.
• Speaking of an MITer who serves as the editor in chief of a campus publication, if you haven’t read Gazette fearless leader Stuart A. Thompson’s response to comments from last week’s blog, you need to do so immediately.
• We’re all about honestly here at Blog the Vote, so I won’t lie to you and tell you that Big Purple Couch is not simply the mouthpiece of the USC. Criticism and analysis are simply not in their wheelhouse. But one thing they do impressively well is elections night coverage. And they made a wise move bringing in our man Matt Ryan as part of their crack team which plugs their election night special here.

Speaking of objectivity…

It’s funny — last week I was told by two different people that this blog is biased towards Andrew Forgione and Saturday another individual told me it was biased towards Omid Salari.

So what do you take from that?

Here’s the thing. I write about what’s newsworthy. Period. I don’t have any responsibility to give the candidates equal coverage or any biases toward one of these three men who I have gotten to know over the past two weeks.

If they aren’t doing something interesting, they probably won’t end up in the blog. Which is why if anyone has gotten the short end of the stick in this space, it’s David Basu Roy. But, frankly, Basu Roy hasn’t done anything particularly newsworthy since the first few days of the campaign period. I can’t make him do interesting things. And I can only dissect his website and videos so much.

So when you’re gearing up to get all 20th century journalism and scorn me for being biased, just remember what this blog is all about.

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