For Christmas, ASUO Vice President Maneesh Arora’s mother gave him a ticket to Sasquatch!, the Northwest’s premier rock festival. At the time, it was just what he wanted, but five months later, he realized he had to pawn it off.
“I’ve been to Sasquatch! twice in the past,” he said. “I was so excited to go this year … But I guess this is part of putting my job over recreational activities.”
So instead of three days partying to the strains of favorite performers such as Band of Horses and My Morning Jacket, Arora cloistered himself in the ASUO office for the weekend to help put together a presentation on one of the student government’s initiatives.
In December, Arora didn’t foresee he would have something better to do with the end of May than go to the festival, but since then he has gone from having, he said, no political ambitions to holding the second-highest elected office at the University.
“I used to hate politics,” he said. “Actually, it’s interesting. I always thought that politics was for those scumbags, you know? Those, kind of, slimy people.”
Yet he now finds himself in politics. He said it was a slow transition that began in November, when friends asked him to run for an ASUO position. “I said ‘No’,” he said.
Around the same time, Arora joined the much-maligned Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. OSPIRG, a nonprofit research and legislative advocacy organization that draws its funding from student fees, has historically been the ASUO’s most controversial group, with many questioning its funding model.
Arora said he shared the negative perceptions of OSPIRG when he became a part of it, but changed his mind later on.
“I had heard some negative things about OSPIRG,” he said. “But then one of my friends told me what they actually work on, and I was confused because I didn’t know how an organization that worked on issues like (those) could be negative.”
A month later, he was running an OSPIRG campaign aimed at lowering textbook prices.
His objective was to get a $2,000 grant from OSPIRG’s nationwide parent organization,
U.S. PIRG, and persuading three professors to adopt free online textbooks.
In the course of doing so, he started becoming more prominent in the ASUO. He presented a resolution before the ASUO Senate on textbook prices. He was also prominent in OSPIRG’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to gain ASUO funding for the 2010–11 school year.
Arora said he has regrets about that process, specifically not listening to the concerns of those deciding whether to fund OSPIRG.
“When they have a concern, even if the (you) don’t necessarily feel like it’s a legitimate concern, you have to work to address that,” he said.
While appearing before the ASUO, Arora met Amelie Rousseau, then ASUO events coordinator and now ASUO president. And his opinion on running for political office began to change.
“If all the people who genuinely care don’t get into politics, then you’re going to have those scumbags, who are the people who actually are in office, who are the elected officials” he said. “So I guess that’s kind of my motivation for getting into politics.”
At first, he wanted to work on a campaign being organized by the ASUO’s self-described “environmental liberal” faction, then-ASUO spokesperson Curtis Haley and Sens. Zachary
Stark-MacMillan and Jeremy Blanchard. Those plans changed in February when he received a phone call. It was from Rousseau.
“I thought about it a little bit, and I called some people who were really close to me, some people who I think of as mentors and decided to do it,” he said. “From talking to her before I decided to run and after, I realized we had a lot of similar values and we had really similar styles of leadership.”
He decided to run with Rousseau, leaving behind Haley’s campaign, which later merged with another campaign then-ASUO Sen. Jairo Castaneda was organizing. Two months later, he was ASUO vice-president–elect.
But so meteoric was his rise that his OSPIRG campaign fell by the wayside.
“Things got a little side-tracked because we had the one week of the OSPIRG petition drive, two weeks of budget hearings, then I went to Washington, D.C., and then, when I came back, I decided to run for vice president,” he said. “So my whole campaign got really thrown off-course.”
Having risen so fast, Arora is still learning the tricks of the political trade, but there are signs he is mastering them. At a recent Senate meeting, Sen. Max Barkley questioned the hiring of former Emerald reporter Robert D’Andrea as Rousseau’s political director. Arora shot back so emphatically that none dared raise the question again.
[email protected]