Judging candidates by their behavior toward students is not a bad idea

By Carrie Buchanan

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat students—or anyone else who lacks power. So the experiences my journalism students had covering the 2016 election in Northeast Ohio told us a lot about the people running for office in this area. I encourage you to read the stories in Election Reflections with that in mind.

There were the candidates who didn’t bother answering repeated calls and emails — that’s a sign of how they’ll behave in office toward constituents.

There were the candidates who celebrated our students and welcomed them into the political process — that, too, is a sign of how they’ll behave in office.

There was the candidate who brought his “lady friend” to a prescheduled interview, then insisted he could not meet at the scheduled time because — well, he didn’t have a reason. After making her wait around for hours, he met but talked down to the student, who was admittedly ignorant about politics. What a way to welcome a millennial to the election!

An inability to talk to someone who is sincerely interested but lacks political sophistication speaks volumes about a candidate.

There was the candidate whose campaign promised he would come to the East Side of Cleveland from the sometimes distant world of the West Side — then failed to even respond to emails and phonecalls to confirm that visit.

There was at least one who stood up the student who had scheduled an interview. The student waited for hours without word on where the candidate was. Another interviewee, after failing to appear twice when two students went downtown for appointments to meet with him, rescheduled with a telephone interview and came through for them.

The region’s U.S. House of Representatives incumbents not only failed to respond to our students, but also refused to participate in public forums arranged by venerable institutions like the League of Women Voters and the City Club. I exempt Marcy Kaptur and Jim Renacci from this blanket condemnation because their campaign managers did talk to our students. We understood that our congressional representatives might be busy. We did not understand why, in several of their offices, no one returned students’ repeated calls and emails over several weeks. Is that how they treat all their constituents?

But for every candidate who treated students as if their time and political interest didn’t matter, there were others who went out of their way to welcome millenials to the political process:

There was the U.S. Senate candidate and former Ohio governor who did an email interview with our student, when the other senate candidate couldn’t be bothered. And the Ohio Senate candidate who encouraged students from the stage, mentioning that John Carroll was in the audience. And his opponent, who gave her time in an interview and, when the story came out, shared it widely on social media, giving everyone in the class a boost as we saw our readership rise.

One candidate spent two hours talking to a student in a coffee shop, asking her about her college studies and career plans before talking about himself.

Another sat down with our student for an hour, right after appearing in a debate at a candidates meeting, and enveloped her in encouragement, showing the kind of teacher she was for decades in the Cleveland public schools.

Some came to meet with their student interviewer at or near John Carroll University because the student lacked transportation. Actually, our congresswoman did this in a previous election, but this year, not even her office staff returned phonecalls and emails until after the story came out, saying that her office had not responded.

Likewise, the county councilman who represents John Carroll University and the surrounding area was elusive for a month, then finally came through when we called to get a photo. Experienced pols know that when a reporter calls to get a photo, it means they’re about to publish—and that the story will say you didn’t call back. Our stories all did that with candidates who failed to respond to repeated attempts to reach them over several weeks.

There are some good candidates out there. There are some who could learn a thing or two about dealing with reporters, even if they are students. And there are some students who did learn a thing or two, covering it all.

I should confess that we were far from perfect ourselves. We had students who got sick or dropped the course and could not complete their stories. So a few candidates are missing from this publication, despite our best efforts to get other students to write those stories on top of their own assignments (which some did!). Students are busy people — I think many working people would be surprised at the complex schedules most of them juggle.

It’s good that the internet offers candidates many opportunities to get the word out about their campaigns, since most candidates in local races don’t get real coverage in mainstream media. We did our best to compensate for that in our small way. And all of us learned a thing or two along the way.