Kirkwood: More savvy than substance

With so many fans of Clinton and Bush the Younger (or Carville and Rove) on this campus and in this year's IUSA campaign, it's a shame that nobody noticed what Kirkwood did.\nSteel and Synergy represented the politically savvy people on campus. To put it broadly, Steel was Republican and Synergy was Democratic. There were crossovers, of course, but Steel ran on Republican themes ("continue the good" was, I think, Bush the Elder's election slogan in 1988) and Synergy ran on a Democratic message (openness and diversity).\nEverybody on those tickets, myself included, knew the rules and the history of the game. Our conversation sparkled with references to Stephanopoulous, Noonan and Salinger. In the set-piece of a student government election, the two campaigns were balanced. A two-way fight would have been tough and vicious, but IUSA had seen it before, and everybody knew what had to be done. \nKirkwood upset this balance. And it did something that hasn't been done in years. Instead of talking about the same old issues, it played to a single constituency. But this didn't make the ticket narrow. It made it successful.\nOn the campaign trail, I discovered that most voters don't know what IUSA does. That's OK. I'm still not sure what IUSA does either, and I wrote the constitution. The voters, however, had quite rationally decided that if they hadn't heard of IUSA by now, it wasn't a major factor in their lives. \nNobody had ever taken the time to explain it to them or tell them why a good student government was important.\nWe shouldn't expect students to know what IUSA is. It's our fault, not theirs. As the "leaders" of this campus, we need to make sure that our "followers" know where we're taking them. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that.\nKirkwood managed to change that dynamic. How? It made IUSA relevant to a very large group of people on campus: Greeks.\nMost people reading this column agree with me, I hope, that the "VOTETRACKER" e-mail was a clear case of voter intimidation. Those who disagree are wrong. But Steel and Synergy missed the larger message in our rush to file our complaints against the ticket. The big picture is this: Kirkwood found a disaffected group that was being persecuted by the administration. Instead of coming up with a broad-based and watered-down message, it instead focused its efforts on helping greeks "take back the power."\nIn other words, Kirkwood did exactly what Reagan and Roosevelt did. It made politics real to people and taught them that apathy would have real consequences. In this case, for the greeks, the stakes were high: The very existence of the greek system was (and is) in jeopardy. Kirkwood developed a message and a platform that promised to address this issue.\nSteel and Synergy were burdened by their experience in office. Our expectations were jaded. We know that no IUSA administration can stop the long-term problems of the greek system, and we know that the administration can frequently be reluctant to take rational actions. We acted like the establishment, and we got a very real scare.\nKirkwood wasn't a particularly good ticket or a particularly bright set of candidates. The candidates lacked intellectual depth and the restraint that would have kept them from committing hazing and misuse of University technology.\nBut they had one thing everyone else lacked -- a good sense of the importance of branding.\nSo strange that the self-proclaimed heirs of Reagan and Clinton, the great communicators, would instead act like Carter and Hoover.