As I noted in my previous post about last month’s US Student Assocation Congress, USSA’s presidential election attracted considerably more drama than the vice presidential, despite the fact that it was uncontested. The veep race was, however, a fascinating one.
There are limits to how much I can say about the vice presidential contest. I know both candidates pretty well, and respect them both, but as an alumnus of USSA I wasn’t privy to much of their campaigning. My sense of the specifics of their platforms and agendas is incomplete, and the differences in their vision for the Association were nuanced enough that I don’t trust myself to lay them out here without misrepresenting one or both of them.
So what can I say?
Well, the two candidates share a lot in common. Both are veterans of USSA, and both hail from colleges that lie at the core of USSA’s current membership. Maxwell Love is from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, USSA’s first home and the site of its constitutional convention, a university that has always been a mainstay of the Association and of American student organizing. John Connelly is from Rutgers, a relative newcomer to USSA membership, but a campus that has seen extraordinary student power activism in recent years and is one of the founding members of New Jersey United Students, perhaps