Student Government 2.0

During my junior year of college, I unwittingly became the assistant campaign manager for Stanford’s foremost megalomaniac. He was running for student-body president, and I was mostly going along with it. I did it because I was friends with his running mate and bad at saying no. Also, all my friends were studying abroad! Also, he was reasonably attractive.

The candidate (let’s call him Ben) wasn’t hard to mock. He was verbose and obsessed with his own personal brand. For example, earlier that year, he’d published a 40-page life plan and promoted it on social media. He also stated publicly that one of his goals was to bring the “most entrepreneurial animal to campus.” To make matters worse, Ben didn’t even suggest bringing a groundhog, which is undoubtedly the most entrepreneurial animal because it literally invents the seasons. He also wrote lengthy articles for the campus publications about his “lifehacker” lifestyle. Here’s an excerpt from his daily schedule:

I woke up at 9:45 a.m. to my alarm after eight hours and 15 minutes of sleep, turned off the sleep-enhancing rain music emanating from my laptop, ate one and a half bowls of high-fiber, low-carb cereal with a once-a-day multivitamin and Omega-3 capsules from 9:46 a.m. to 9:53 a.m., speed-read articles on Google Reader for seven minutes, then showered for nine minutes.

His open obsession with optimizing his personal brand was off-putting to a lot of the student body. He had been in the student government since he started at Stanford. In fact, he might have been part of every student organization. The year before, he had started an entrepreneurship-themed dorm that was cleverly named eDorm (the camel case is key, or else you wouldn’t know that it was created by a certified “hacker”). The idea of the dorm was that students who were interested in starting companies could all live together and talk about starting companies. This was unique at Stanford because, in all the other dorms, the minority of students who were uninterested in starting companies also had to listen to students talk about starting companies. There’s really nothing quite like holding a seminar about raising Series A funding to cement the bonds formed in a college dorm #thebest4years.

To reinvent himself after several failures, Ben called his campaign “Ben 2.0.” This particular personal update was well behind the iPhone, which was on 4.0 by then. I’m sure the failure of not updating his personal software as frequently as Apple did haunted him. I didn’t realize Ben had any supporters, but one night I accidentally (and I mean accidentally — I was not good at nor even slightly invested in my job) walked in on his campaign rally in one of the rooms in the student union. He was standing in front of about 50 people, none of whom I’d ever seen, and he was chanting “two-point-oh! two-point-oh, two-point-oh!” I looked on in horror, expecting the audience to start laughing at him. To my amazement, the entire room began chanting along with him. Who were these loyal fans!? It’s only later that I realized they might not be students at the university.

Ben’s campaign was riddled with controversy. There was an incident in which he gave students’ names and email addresses to outside companies to scrape, adding to our very real fear of having our data accessed against our will. Much like our current President, there was widespread speculation about his mental health. His campaign came to a head when he was accused of paying Cambodian orphans for “likes” on his social media. The story ran in the campus newspaper about a week before the election, and all hell broke loose.

To his credit, Ben himself was not paying Cambodian orphans. He was paying a service that was paying people in countries including but not limited to Cambodia to like his posts, and I don’t know whether or not they were orphans. He was using this site to bolster his social media, which explains why his Facebook posts often got over 100 likes even though his personality got zero likes. I went to his account to see what he was actually paying this service for, and he had just posted a job request that read, verbatim, “I need someone to follow other blogs on Tumblr for my blog, and then later unfollow other blogs on a different day.” The strategy was flawless — he had at least 12 Tumblr followers.

Following the Cambodia issue, Ben was dragged through the mud by all the campus publications. He really wasn’t a bad guy, though — he was just a little too public about his self-promotion. I would also say that a lot of his actions were the product of the intense and entrepreneurship-obsessed environment at Stanford. He did start to garner some sympathy during the last few days of voting, and I thought perhaps he might get a pity win. Of course, I was a wholly ineffective campaign manager, mostly because I was embarrassed to admit that it was even my role, but also because I was buried in problem sets that quarter.

The day before the election, his running mate got drunk, stood on a table at a frat and announced she’d make out with anyone who would vote for her. I had the unlucky job of confirming that the people she’d made out with actually logged in and voted for her. While her effort was appreciated by many, it was too little too late. The next day, he lost the general election 80% to 13% (7% going to other parties — I think the main one was a vote slate, making it one of the most successful student “humor” groups). I don’t know if the winning party campaigned at all.

Still, I learned a lot from Ben. Even for small elections, it matters that the candidates be genuine. It matters that we be able to see and like our candidates’ personal sides. It matters that we never appear to be trying too hard. I also learned that groundhogs do have a successful track record of predicting when spring will come if you live in Palo Alto, and it’s literally never not spring.