Election Kickoff

There are few campus-side stories that are as much fun to report as those for Columbia College Student Council Elections. It has the same macabre interest as any good popularity contest, a cross between choosing teams for dodgeball and homecoming queen. Players begin scheming well before the game, positioning themselves as either "popular" or "unpopular," attempting to gain prominence, balancing their ticket between people who are well liked and people who know what they are doing. There is backstabbing, conniving, manipulation, and the last 24 hours at the end of the months-long run-up to the election that began at the beginning of the semester, still nobody has any idea what is going on.
This year was no exception. The weeks running up to the election were filled with rumors and pettiness as hyper-sensitive sources and super-ambitious students work to position themselves and their friends before the deadlines. One night last month, I found myself making calls for nearly two hours into the early hours of the morning, debating with potential candidate George Krebs, CC '09, on phrasing regarding his potential interest. We ended up saying "Krebs hinted at a possible run at president of the CCSC executive board" with the quote "I'm going to explode onto the scene in my own way should I decide to run." There were at least two communications regarding the more-direct phrasing "Krebs said he was considering a possible run...," a wording that Krebs objected to strenuously.
In any case, as the time ticked down to the deadline, it looked as though it was going to be a one-woman race--Michelle Diamond, VP of CC '08, was running for the presidency, the president of CC '08 was going to stay on in that position, Krebs decided he wanted to stay on as class president, and nobody else was stepping up. We have been told from several sources, though, that a few seniors basically decided that they didn't want Diamond to to be president. (Seniors Dan Okin, president of ESC, and Keith Hernandez, president of ABC, who were both fingered in the allegations, denied them).
We began hearing concrete rumors late on Sunday, 26 hours before the filing deadline, that two candidates--Will Snider and Felipe Tarud--were considering runs at the presidency. This meant couple of things for us: First, that the race probably wasn't going to be unopposed, meaning that we would have actual conflict to cover (if you will all flip to your copies of The Interplay of Influence, you'll remember that conflict is good for stories.), but second--and more importantly to me--both potential candidates were courting one of my best friends, Paula Cheng, to run for a position as vice president.
Now, brief review--Erin Durkin and I are both news editors. As a general rule of thumb, we split up stories so I take all those articles about things occurring within the gates, and she takes those beyond. If Paula had decided to run for VP, that would have meant I couldn't have read any stories about the E-Board elections, which, depending on how you look at it, is either great because I get more sleep or awful because I don't get to take part in one of the more-exciting stories each year.
Candidates burned the midnight oil and worked all through the next day, but even by 8:00 p.m., when we decide what stories are going to be on our front page, nobody was sure who was going to be running. We knew that our best photo was likely going to be of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification's demonstration regarding the blight study within Columbia's proposed expansion area, and we weren't able to get an interview that we needed for a story on a new tapas bar (read today's issue for more on that), so we decided to make CCSC lead.
As the story finally reported, the last-minute maneuvering had produced a ridiculous slate of candidates. Four people initially declared--the most in institutional memory--quadruple the number that had been expected as little as two hours before. Of the candidates, we had only heard rumors regarding one beforehand, and, fortunately for Erin's sleep schedule, Paula decided not to run.
The last-minute nature of the declarations--and, in the case of the Revolve party, subsequent withdrawl--meant that we were up late reporting. The story finally came in at 2:20 a.m., meaning the paper went to bed at 4:30 and I got to bed at 5:30 which is why this post is coming out so late.
Time to go to bed again. I'll try and get these updates up earlier in the future.