About a week ago, I e-mailed the three main candidates for student body president and asked if they would consent to interviews.

I did not consider Vance Blanton, since he has not promoted his campaign and does not appear to care whether he wins.

I told them that I would report my frank opinions of them in my next column, and warned that if I perceived shortcomings in their characters or platforms I would not hesitate to report these shortcomings to Technician’s readers.

Will Quick and Will Langley agreed to do the interviews, but Cody Williams never responded.

This speaks very poorly of Cody Williams. He did not even do me the courtesy of declining an interview, which tells me that he has neither the guts, the confidence nor the social sense to be a successful politician. Therefore I eliminate Cody Williams from my calculations, and consider him much the worst man for the job.

Will Quick responded to my e-mail the very same day. I found him to be a smart, personable, intelligent, capable and thoroughly nice fellow. His air was alert and his countenance friendly.

Indeed, he struck me as a prototypical student body president, exactly what you would expect an SBP to be. If he had a fault, it was that he was TOO perfect; he was generic, a cookie-cutter candidate. A guy indistinguishable from Quick runs for student body president at every school in the country.

I should stress that Mr. Quick struck me as honest, good-hearted and thoroughly capable. I asked him straight-up whether he would ever put fraternity interests before the interests of the student body, and he replied, “No. I think everybody knows that who knows me in Greek Life.” He claims that he will institute a book-rental program (as does Mr. Langley), produce a booklet listing the hours and specials of all local restaurants and set up concerts and other live events to raise public awareness of Student Government.

He gave the impression that he would achieve these goals, too. He seemed a very capable guy.

Will Langley was also a good man, but in a different way. He was down-to-earth, smiled a lot, laughed a lot and swore a good deal. He did not strike me as so intelligent or capable as Will Quick, but he has a certain shine about him, an absolute confidence in himself and his ideas, and he certainly beats Will Quick in the area of personal presence and force of character.

If you locked Mr. Quick and Mr. Langley in a room and said, “Fight to the death,” I am confident that Mr. Langley is the one who would walk out alive.

Mr. Langley did lack Mr. Quick’s raw competence, however, and had an inferior understanding of the way goals are achieved. One of his main platform promises was to set up a student special at Bojangles’. I asked if he had discussed the idea with the owner, and he replied that he had spoken to the manager. I pointed out that the owner, not the manager, would make the decision, but Mr. Langley did not seem troubled by this, and brushed the point aside.

So, to sum up, Quick is your prototype candidate; but Langley is more forceful, more endearing and probably less capable.

A point in favor of Quick: he never once said a word against Langley, while Langley referred to Quick’s promises as … well, take your best guess. In my book, this puts Mr. Quick ahead of Mr. Langley.

A point in favor of Langley: he is a native of Raleigh, having lived here all his life. He heard Jimmy V’s “Never give up” speech in person.

Quick, on the other hand, is a native of South Carolina. Mr. Quick claimed that a presidential candidate’s geographical origins shouldn’t matter: the analogy he used is that forbidding him from being president on the grounds of his not being a native would be the same as forbidding a black person from being president because blacks are a minority at State.

But this is not a valid analogy. This school is not called “White People State.”

I will draw no final conclusion on the relative merits of the two candidates.

Quick and Langley are about equal, and either one would make a fine student body president. If you want a competent, respectable whiz-kid from South Carolina, vote Quick; if you want a genuine, likeable, highly-motivated Raleigh native, vote Langley.

I haven’t decided, myself.

E-mail Jeff at [email protected]