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Yesterday, The Stanford Daily Editorial Board, a separate entity from the paper itself, released its ASSU executive endorsement for Tenzin Seldon and Joe Vasquez.
Over the past two years, the Stanford Daily Editorial Board has endorsed the winning executive slate (Gobaud/Day La Torre, Cardona/Wharton). The Stanford Review, Women’s Coalition, FLIP, and GAIA (Green Alliance for Innovative Action) join the Board in endorsing the Tenzin/Vasquez campaign.
As Fiat Lux covered earlier, the MacGregor-Dennis/Cruz campaign touts an ambitious 114 ideas under 16 different platforms, according to their campaign website. However, in spite of this, the Daily still identified the objectives of the Tenzin/Vasquez campaign as having more potential for crafting a strong ASSU for the coming academic year.
Apparently, the lack of cohesion and commitment behind the MacGregor-Dennis Cruz campaign platforms was especially evident in the Board’s interview with Michael Cruz. In spite of being a 3-year veteran of the ASSU, his responses “did not correctly match his statements to the platform points listed on the slate’s website.” Additionally, Cruz often “deferred” to Macgregor-Dennis in many questions. As the Daily Editorial insightfully explained, “[Cruz’s] personal growth in the ASSU — while admirable — is not an appropriate response to an inquiry about the policy levers at the Exec’s disposal under all but the most strained interpretation of the question.”
MacGregor-Dennis himself, while the primary visionary behind the MacGregor-Dennis/Cruz ticket, did not appear to the Daily to have a differentiated reason for electing to run for ASSU exec himself—in his interview with the Daily Editorial Board, he was unable to “answer why fundamentally the Executive position was the right position for him to trot out his iPhone apps and web analytic data analysis.”
It will be interesting to see in this election whether the endorsement affirms the winning slate yet again, or whether factors like ASSU experience, and a SOCC endorsement spell a win for MacGregor-Dennis.
