The SGA election campaign is currently working on a petty and immature level. And the Reveille is caught in the bickering.
It isn’t that this is a “dirty” SGA race. The real problem is that it is a new low, in terms of tacky campaigning. And the sad fact is that the Reveille must pay attention to their name-calling.
The candidates are fighting for the “most powerful” student position at LSU, command of a $95,000 budget and the hassle of dealing with the SGA Assembly.
Being SGA president is an important job, but it’s not worth lying, making crank calls and bickering over picky details.
It is not worth mounting immature, pointless campaigns. It is not worth making outrageous, misleading campaign promises.
And it’s definitely not worth sucking the Reveille into the mud of dishonorable, meaningless SGA politics.
A few of the shenanigans:
-Candidate A called to say the SGA reporter was “too far up Kirt Bennett’s ass” and demanded that a new staff writer cover the Assembly.
-Partisans of that same candidate called Thursday to allege that the executive office was disrupting the distribution of the Reveille. We investigated and discovered the charges were a hoax.
-That day we received other calls, supporters of both Candidates A and B, some callers giving us conflicting details, stumbling over their claims.
-As it turns out, these phone pranksters also called Reveille advertisers, saying either that the SGA executive office had stolen newspapers, that the Reveille had decreased production, were overcharging clients or that we were destroying the paper.
-Every letter the Reveille receives in support of Candidate B comes printed on the same paper, off the same printer. It looks like an endorsement factory is at work.
The games don’t stop with the Reveille. Wednesday we found out that someone, a political friend of one of the candidates, is spreading rumors about the current SGA administration on the campus of another Louisiana University.
This is more of the same silliness.
People are tired of negative campaigning. We saw it in The Johnston-Duke-Bagert race. We saw it in the Ann Richards-Clayton Williams race in the Texas governor’s race. We saw it three years ago when President Bush tore Michael Dukakis to shreds.
In “real” politics, candidates often reserve their attacks for situations when they need a small boost.
But these SGA candidates, raised on a generation of political attacks, have come out swinging with their own behind-the-scenes versions of mudslinging.
It’s like seeing 12-year-olds smoking. They don’t look cool – they just look silly.
And it’s silly for us to even raise the issue on this page.
The candidates must turn this campaign around. They must stop bickering. We must demand: No more rumors, no more games.
Marci, James Lee, Laurie, don’t tire us with smoke and mirrors. Please hit the issues and give us something good to say about you.

This 1991 article has been digitized by The Reveille’s Digital Staff in honor of Dean Martin Johnson, who graduated from the Manship School of Mass Communication in 1991 and was an editor for The Reveille during his time at LSU.