For all the self-important squawking that emanates from Maxwell Auditorium every Monday during Student Association meetings, it could be worse.

Sure, SA meetings can drone on forever, making actual student participation as inviting as a genital-kicking contest and scarce unless they are trying to hijack funding. Sure, some administrations feel a little too comfortable with the university listserv, leaving inboxes campus-wide jammed with Drew Lederman’s ruminations on the deal with airline food. And sure, the gang normally makes little progress on big issues. But hell, they efficiently distribute a hefty student fee every year while everyone and their mother begs for more money, and if the only time we have to bitch about them is when they try something out of the ordinary then they have to be doing all the ordinary things right. Right?

So like I said, it could be worse. We could be the University of Florida.

Meet Travis ‘T-Bone’ Marsh, a senior mechanical engineering major at UF who recently completed his own political career in Gainesville. To really understand why Travis ran, you need to get a feel for the system at UF.

Where SU student politics are limited to glad-handing at the Schine Student Center and chain IMs from the candidates, young Gators have to endure gaudy multi-thousand dollar assaults to their senses. This spring, student political parties with names like Access and Innovate, both of which would fit better in the progressive sex industry, campaigned with NYPIRG-style ‘get out the vote’ tactics.

So replace the possibly unwashed hippies with cardigan-clad go-getters and you can get an idea for why Marsh thought that there was room for a change.

So The Keg Party was born.

Marsh, along with a few other renegades, decided to cut against the grain. Instead of ponying up thousands of their own stack, they decided to sell t-shirts instead of giving them away. Instead of placing their message on a slick flash-animated website, they published something that wouldn’t seem out of place on Geocities. Instead of chasing down potential voters, they erected a sign reading ‘We Don’t Harass People, Come Talk To Us.’

‘They’re a bunch of dirty politicians,’ Marsh said of his competition. ‘They sucker (the voters) in with lies.’

David decided that he would attack Goliath with the same issue 50 Cent used to take down Ja Rule: credibility. If every president of the United States is a religious man who has a loving wife and opposes gay marriage, it is because the majority of Americans were married in a church to someone of the opposite sex. So why shouldn’t the student government president of a major state university be a socially conscious individual who enjoys a few adult beverages and demands two-ply toilet paper in every campus bathroom (a real campaign issue)?

Sadly, in general elections last week The Keg Party gallantly fell in battle, although they did take away enough votes to force a run-off between two of the big boys. Marsh is now instructing all supporters to vote for the Access candidates because ‘they are not run by a bunch of douche bags.’

This columnist feels that this position is unacceptable. In the final day of run-off elections to take place today, please ask anybody you know at UF to write in The Keg Party. If you are reading this from UF, I am asking you to please do the same. Send a message to all the ‘Oh Look At Me I Can Program a Flash Website’ dandies that currently populate student government. In fact, do it drunk, make it known that there ARE good decisions to be made after getting liquored up.

As for the future? Marsh leaves after this semester, but he predicts a Keg Party president by this time next year. To insure this, the party is currently gearing up to begin the campaign before finals this year.

‘We are going to start doing stuff for that soon,’ he said. ‘We are just going to be like, ‘What? We didn’t know elections were over. We were busy drinking.”

Justin Young is a junior news major

Published on March 2, 2004 at 12:00 pm