And They Still Had to Cheat?

A Daily Cal reporter asked me on February 23 whether my like-minded voters and I were surprised by the low turnout projected for the recall election; as I recall, my reaction was, “I wouldn’t say we’re surprised, but we’re definitely disappointed.” This sentiment pretty neatly sums up my feelings in light of the news that Senator John Moghtader has successfully been recalled. My lack of surprise results from the knowledge – advertised here for weeks – that this election was nothing more than a vendetta campaign launched by personal political enemies of Senator Moghtader’s, and one which meant little-to-nothing to most students on campus. The disappointment, in large part, results from the self-importance and laziness of Berkeley students – the former of which led waves of kids to express their outrage at the egregious waste of their money, and the latter of which made the same juveniles unwilling to go three feet out of their way to express this outrage in any effective manner.

Thursday morning, a story broke in the Daily Cal (see here) reporting a leak that revealed emails sent by ASUC President Roxanne Winston and Senator Kifah Shah, advocating the recall of Senator Moghtader. (The reason this is newsworthy is that ASUC Senate officials are forbidden to use their positions of – for lack of a more befitting word – “power” to pull sway as far elections are concerned.) Further implicated were External Affairs Vice President Dionne Jirachaikitti and Senator Mary June Flores: the former had an offending email sent through her listserv (though she, in proper Nixonian fashion, denies any knowledge of said email’s existence), while the latter publicly demonstrated her colors by pushing for the election to take place during finals last semester.

Senator Shah’s email – an odd, haphazardly worded little ditty that displays an alarming disregard for the sanctity of the English language – concerned the mobilization of Senators from the opposing party (Student Action, the proverbial Aaron Burr to CalSERVE’s Alexander Hamilton) in garnering support for Senator Moghtader’s removal from office. She claims that the email was sent out in a purely private capacity, with no intent to abuse her position as a Senator to assist in the takedown of the president of Tikvah: Students for Israel; despite her well-publicized status within the ranks of Students for Justice in Palestine, I am, of course, inclined to believe her wholeheartedly.

President Winston’s email was addressed to senators and an SJP official, intended to put them in contact with one another and express her intent to “lend [her] support as best [she could]” in the recall campaign. She, too, has recently claimed that her email was sent out in a purely private capacity, with no intent to abuse her position as President of the ASUC to assist the takedown of a Senator she’d presumably long wished had never been elected. Her email, though, ended in an electronic signature that identified her as the President of the ASUC.

I smell a rat... and this time, it isn’t just that standard Berkeley odor.

Though I can’t say I know her personally, from my position Roxanne Winston reminds me a good deal of Star Wars crimelord Jabba the Hutt – not because of her Rubenesque proportions, but because of her position as the self-serving, short-sighted, and woefully incompetent figurehead of a bloated organization that holds little realistic claim to power and seemingly never gets anything done, yet nonetheless is somehow capable of dragging untold sums of cash out of an unwilling populace. I believe the fact that this ASUC Senate has developed a distinct reputation – mind you, among the pantheon of incapacity that precedes it in the annals of ASUC history – as one that can’t get anything done must lie, in large part, at her feet. In this particular instance, I can’t tell if she’s lying because she’s been caught, or if she was just too damn lazy to erase the letterhead at the bottom of her email – and frankly, I don’t know which would be worse. It would seem we’re either dealing with a woman who illegally abused her position and then lied about it to her constituency (again, rather Nixonian), or else one whose unwillingness to make the slightest effort even when it’s most called for is exacerbating the chronic Senatorial stagnation! Call it one simple man’s opinion, but abuse of power and incompetence sound more like legitimate reasons to begin an obscenely expensive recall than anything I’ve heard or read since this hullabaloo started.

I’m at this stage disappointed that the recall went through for four basic reasons: (a) I believe it was an overblown vendetta, parlayed into a simple miscarriage of justice; (b) I believe the 3717 votes cast in the recall election should not constitute a sufficient percentage of the 24,636 undergraduates enrolled at Berkeley to overturn the purportedly democratic election that saw Senator Moghtader receive more votes than all but 6 other candidates last year; (c) at the risk of beating this dead horse officially beyond recognizability, I believe that the recall of a Senator from a meaningless Senate with 2 months left in his term was categorically NOT worth the astonishing expenditure; and (d) finally, I fear that the outcome, combined with my readily apparent stance on the election itself, will mislead readers into believing that my disgust with the would-be politicians outed in Zach E.J. Williams’ article stems only from resentfulness. To be candid: the very “behavior unbefitting an official of the ASUC” that those behind the recall were (evidently successfully) attempting to convince voters that Senator Moghtader was guilty of has here been ably displayed by both Senator Shah and President Winston, to say nothing of Jirachaikitti or Flores.

For me there is no way around the conclusion that a concerted effort must now be made to ensure that the responsible parties do not find their way back into the ASUC. If some putrid cocktail of fate, lies, corruption, and laziness has seen to it that the Berkeley student body was not able to make use of the recall election to declare that it’ll have no part in yet more unrepentant squandering of public funds, then the regularly scheduled election will have to do so in its stead.

It’s funny that the most important thing I get out of studying history is something they don’t try particularly hard to impress on us in classes at Berkeley: that the only thing worse than electing conniving, manipulative politicians is electing them twice.