Natalie Delgadillo: FIRED UP! slate had passion, but lacked USAC knowledge

The UCLA student body wasn’t “fired up” to vote for the candidates on this year’s ambitiously named new slate.

FIRED UP!, a slate that formed in this year’s election cycle, did not win even one of the six seats it contested. In fact, the slate’s candidates were eliminated in the first round of every three-way race.

This abject failure of the new slate may seem strange on its surface – many of FIRED UP!’s platforms and sentiments about remaking the Undergraduate Students Association Council as an institution resonate with the student body.

What’s more, the slate’s base of support from several organizations in the Community Programs Office should have given it a fighting chance at the very least.

But while this third slate had the ethos and possibly even the voter base to snag a spot on council, the devil is in the details. A slate that professes to want to reform USAC has to deliver a strategy that works, something that FIRED UP! failed to do.

Take Miriam Rodriguez, the presidential candidate for FIRED UP! Rodriguez spent the better part of this election cycle failing to show up for events or leaving them early. After giving her opening statements at last week’s endorsement hearing, she stood up and walked out, leaving the other two presidential candidates on stage.

Her submission to the Daily Bruin shortly thereafter listed a rational and perfectly legitimate series of grievances about the endorsement process, like the clearly planted questions and rehearsed answers. The fact that Bruins United Financial Supports commissioner candidate Heather Rosen belted out an on-pitch parking-based parody of a song from the Disney musical “Frozen” bears out that accusation.

But instead of speaking up at the hearing and denouncing the process, Rodriguez chose to walk out, confusing likely voters and preventing them from posing questions.

The strategy of rejecting the elections process and USAC as an institution spelled disaster for FIRED UP! as a slate. If you don’t buy into the process or even the idea of student government, and if your platforms betray total ignorance about the way student government works, how can you expect to make any headway in an office?

One of Rodriguez’s platforms was, word-for-word: “Not $1 of fees and surplus $ to USAC initiatives.” That platform displays a dangerous misunderstanding of USAC, whose only source of revenue is student fees.

By contrast, the candidates who ran with Bruin Alliance, a third slate that popped up last year, offered a series of tangible reforms such as reworking the USAC appointment system to make it more equitable and merit-based.

While Bruin Alliance lacked the built-in support of campus groups that propelled the other two slates to victory, it at least offered real, well-understood criticism of the student government.

Other FIRED UP! candidate platforms included huge objectives that are entirely outside of the purview of student government, like adding a dental plan to UCSHIP and bringing affirmative action back to the state of California.

Those platforms, too, display total ignorance about what USAC is and what it can do.

USAC does face a number of institutional challenges, but they are complex and require a shrewd understanding of the system to resolve. For instance, excess funds from the previous council leave councilmembers scratching their heads year after year, but unilaterally barring USAC initiatives from accessing that money is too simple to possibly work.

A slate that runs candidates who not only feel strongly about USAC’s shortcomings but also understand it as an institution might be able to get undecided students to pay attention. Combining the passion of FIRED UP! with the salient criticism of Bruin Alliance could be a winning formula for a third slate.

Ultimately, the only way to reform USAC is to understand USAC. FIRED UP! failed to do that, and the election results clearly showed it.