A Vote For Me is Vote For Not The Other Guy

I was a political science major at the time, because I hadn't realized yet that philosophy was even more abstract and impractical. There was an election for student senate president at the college I attended, and a guy named Peter something-or-other was running unopposed for the office. He was currently serving as the treasurer, and everybody seemed to assume he was a shoo-in for the top job.

"This will not stand!" I hollered to the three other staffers who were still lolling about the offices of the student newspaper at 10pm, the night before the election. "This is America! You can't have candidates for high office running unopposed!"

I decided then and there that I would start a write-in campaign. I might not win, but at least I'd make Peter whatever-his-name-was work for his win.

This was in 1990, before digital photography and sophisticated desktop publishing, so a friend and I used the office copy machine to make a hundred campaign posters with inane slogans like "The name you can trust" scrawled next to a grainy, virtually unrecognizable 500% magnification of my driver's license photo. We ran all over campus, plastering these things on every wall next to every poster of Peter whosit.

Now anyone who has ever met me could tell you how ill-disposed I am to be in politics. I have a very low tolerance for bullshit, I'm a total know-it-all, and I have a tendency to blurt out rude, absurd, or blatantly offensive statements just for the fun of it. And I've actually mellowed over the past 18 years; back in 1990 I was nearly insufferable.

So the odds of me winning this election, even if I had started campaigning weeks earlier, were virtually nil. The student body was about 4,000 people, and as of the morning of the election maybe 8% had any idea who I was. Of those, probably half thought I was the biggest asshole on campus, and would have voted against me if the other candidate had been Idi Amin. And of those few people who actually knew and liked me, probably 95% would have been terrified to have me in a position of authority.

You'd be surprised how hard it is to pull off a definitive second place finish in a two man race under these circumstances. And as if being virtually unknown, not well liked among the segment of the electorate who knew me, and not having me name on the ballot weren't handicap enough, the current senate president went around tearing down my posters the morning of the election.

It was a rule, you see, that any signs put up on campus had to be approved by the senate. She could tell they were unapproved because they didn't bear the student senate seal. Of course, the student senate seal was kept in an unlocked desk about 20 feet from my campaign headquarters, and if I had known that she was going to be such a humorless bitch about my pathetic little campaign, I'd have gone to the trouble of forging senate approval. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Undaunted, I got up well before noon that day and skipped two classes to campaign hard. I called everyone I knew to urge them to vote for me. Because I was clearly unfit for the office, my only hope for getting votes was to convince people that I had no chance of winning.

"It's just for fun," I'd say. "There's no way I'm going to win. My name's not even on the ballot. You have to write me in. I'll be lucky to get 5% of the vote."

I have to admit that it was a little demoralizing to realize just how frightened my friends were of the prospect of me holding political office. I had to basically guarantee them that the odds of me winning were statistically insignificant, and even then I could rarely get a firm commitment. The problem, I think, is a characteristic that very few people possess, which I will call anti-charisma.

Anti-charisma kicks in when you're basically an asshole and everybody knows it, but you're an asshole is a way that makes people think that you appeal to a broad spectrum of other assholes. Newt Gingrich and Hilary Clinton both possess hefty amounts of anti-charisma. Almost nobody likes either of them, but a perception exists, for some reason, that some large group consisting of people other than me must like them.

You see, I had gotten to be such an insensitive jerk that it was difficult for people to fathom that I was as big of a jerk as I seemed. They assumed that there was something that they were missing; that deep down I must be alright because nobody could get away with being that much of an asshole all the time. The truth, of course, was that I really was that much of an asshole, and I could get away with it precisely because people people didn't realize that the asshole scale went that high. The lack of imagination of ordinary people is a prime enabler of assholishness.

My friends saw how I got away with being an asshole, and were therefore skeptical of their fellow voters' ability to appraise my assholishness. So even the people who might have voted for me out of pity tended to vote against me on principle, in case they were the only ones standing between me and political power.

With a lot of hard work and assurances that I wouldn't take the job even if I were elected, which I wouldn't be, I swear to God, I managed a pitiful second place finish, garnering around 4% of the votes -- thanks mostly to historically low voter turnout. I didn't even have the satisfaction of being a spoiler.

That first campaign was definitely a learning experience, though. And who knows, if I had started my campaign a few weeks earlier, gotten my name on the ballot, and printed up some nice-looking official campaign signs... I might have scared away that 4% too.