Evil still lurks in the Associated Student Government office.
Nearly two years after Dave Sheldon — a self-proclaimed evil deity — was elected ASG president, about 40 of his campaign posters still cover the east wall of the ASG office. At the center of this montage is a sign that sums up Sheldon’s political career at Northwestern.
“Evil Dave. For three years, the dominant force in political entertainment,” it reads.
Sheldon and his campaign team backed up that claim during the ASG presidential elections from 1996-1999, plastering the campus with outrageous signs and enlivening the debates with impromptu wrestling matches.
With freshmen preparing to vote in their first ASG elections on April 10 and half the students on campus unfamiliar with Evil Dave campaign tactics, Sheldon’s four-year ASG career is worth revisiting — if only to find out how evil once conquered the campus, and to see if it could happen again.
Sheldon himself, who now works for Microsoft, cryptically promised that evil would ooze its way back into ASG elections this year, whether the campus is ready for it or not.
But this year’s ASG presidential candidates, who begin campaigning Monday, say they aren’t planning to bring much “evil” back to elections. McCormick sophomore and candidate Jay Goyal, for example, said he will be running a fairly straightforward, conventional campaign.
“I’m a firm believer in democracy,” he said. “I think it’s something that should be taken seriously. I don’t plan on doing anything that would compromise the integrity of the system.”
Although the purest evil may be gone, Sheldon’s legacy lives on in ASG elections and the organization itself. Education junior Jordan Heinz, who ran a successful campaign last year for ASG Executive Vice President, said he doesn’t plan to copy any of Sheldon’s antics, but he might pay homage to some of Sheldon’s posters.
“It really helps to create something that’s catchy and not just political,” he said. “I hope to kind of emulate that (with my signs) this year.”
And former ASG speaker of the Senate Richard Caldarone said Sheldon’s victory was the best thing that happened to ASG during Caldarone’s five years of service. Sheldon’s presence certainly boosted voter turnout: an average of 3,000 students per year voted when Sheldon was on the ballot; without Sheldon, that number fell to 2,600 last year.
“If I had to place one event that turned this organization around for the better, it would be Evil Dave’s election,” said Caldarone, a Weinberg senior.
But Sheldon said he started running for president because he enjoyed campaigning, and he knew his victory was inevitable.
“Campaigning was fun,” said Sheldon, McCormick ’99. “It was a foregone conclusion that I was going to win eventually, but the student body didn’t understand that until my senior year. They finally came around.”
Sheldon’s friend Stephen Tiszenkel, who worked on all of Sheldon’s campaigns, said the original purpose of the campaigns was to mock the people who took ASG too seriously.
“When we started this, we just wanted to mock the system, but that eventually turned into the stuff of legend,” Tiszenkel said.
‘It Became An Institution’
Sheldon acquired the nickname “Evil Dave” during his freshman year at NU. His friends began calling him evil when they learned he was born in Evanston — Ev. Il. in the phone book.
“We have a theory that Evanston is the center of all evil in the universe,” said Tiszenkel, Medill ’99. “We think (Dave) was taken over by a nexus of pure evil during his birth and became an evil deity.”
Tiszenkel said he met Sheldon Fall Quarter 1995, when they were freshmen living in the Public Affairs Residential College. Tiszenkel and fellow PARC freshmen Christopher Rizzo, Jim Kang, Seth Troubenberg and Jeff Few banded together to form “The Cult of Evil Dave” and properly worship their friend.
At the beginning of Spring Quarter their freshman year, the “cult” members made a decision that would change the face of campus politics for the next four years. They decided to run an “Evil Dave for president” write-in campaign.
Cult members taped quizzical posters all over campus, but they could only garner 28 votes for Sheldon. Tiszenkel pointed out that Sheldon beat out all other write-in candidates, including Yoda and “my left ass cheek.”
Although Sheldon didn’t win the presidency his first try, he did get the attention of some student groups. College Bowl asked him to be their ASG senator, and Sheldon relished the role. He remained a senator all four years, joining ASG’s Rules Committee and becoming chair of the ethics committee. He also wrote many pieces of legislation, including bills titled, “I Wrote This in Ten Minutes,” and “I’m Gonna Break my F’n Ass Out Here.”
Tiszenkel said Sheldon’s involvement in ASG made him the perfect presidential candidate.
“Dave was all things to all people,” Tiszenkel said. “If you were fed up with the system, then Evil Dave was your man. But if you really cared and wanted someone passionate about the position, he had you there, too. You would have had to been stupid to not vote for Dave (in 1999).”
ASG President Adam Humann said Sheldon’s style of campaigning brought a lot of attention to ASG during the elections.
“More students picked up The Daily and read about the ASG elections just to see what Evil Dave did,” he said.
Although Humann ran a serious campaign, he said he appreciated the humor Sheldon brought to the race. “This is college. There’s something to be said for candidates who bring amusement and entertainment to the race.”
Although he liked entertainment in the campaigns, Humann said it was ASG’s job to make senators and their constituents realize the importance of elections.
“If I’m doing my job, joke candidates won’t get elected,” he said.
But Sheldon said his campaigns showed that seriousness was not the best strategy.
“Nobody on campus cares about ASG, so when you campaign saying ASG’s the most important thing to you, it doesn’t really strike a chord with anybody,” he said.
Although Sheldon’s tactics have been modified and adopted, the evil has yet to be recaptured. Speech junior Stefan Beck mounted an unsuccessful campaign for ASG president last year emulating some of Sheldon’s campaign tactics.
“I got the feeling from the success of his candidacy that the majority of campus doesn’t take ASG elections seriously,” said Beck, now a Speech senior. “I just wanted to give something that made the campaign more interesting to campus.”
Although Beck tried to inject humor into the elections with his campaign promise to shoot all the crows that hover above campus, he lost soundly to Humann.
“Maybe (my campaign) was too soon,” Beck mused. “With Evil Dave, there was a progression over a four-year time and it became an institution. His popularity grew and it was impossible for anyone to duplicate that without building that base over time.”
BREAKING INTO THE MAINSTREAM
Sheldon’s campaign promises were anything but ordinary. His main goal was to return the Lakefill to the “People of the Lake” and pay them financial reparations for the hardships they had to endure.
As an evil deity, Sheldon claimed to have the power to communicate with the People of the Lake, a race of half-human, half-fish beings in Lake Michigan that he said were massacred when NU administrators decided to build the Lakefill in 1964.
Although Sheldon championed the cause, the People of the Lake did not always appreciate his efforts. While Sheldon was making his closing statement at the 1997 presidential debates, a representative of the People of the Lake interrupted Sheldon, accusing him of exploiting them for his own political gain. After a short skirmish, the representative choke-slammed Sheldon through a table.
Sheldon said the attack exposed a large audience to the plight of the People of the Lake.
“They needed a high profile way to get their message across and beating the crap out of me seemed like a good way to do it,” he said. “I might not have agreed, but it’s hard to argue against a gro
up that’s been so systematically oppressed for so long and are attempting for the first time to break into the mainstream.”
Sheldon’s campaign team continued the wrestling antics at the debate during the 1998 and 1999 campaigns. At the 1998 debate, Sheldon’s closing statements were again interrupted, this time by a Mexican wrestler named “El Presidente.” This time Sheldon got the best of his opponent, finishing him off with a flying elbow from the stage to the audience floor.
Sheldon had to battle his own campaign team during the 1999 debate. He began the debate answering questions seriously, but Adam Grayson, then a Medill sophomore and a member of Sheldon’s campaign team, stood up and accused Dave of selling out. Sheldon threw popcorn chicken at Grayson, hit him with a food tray and smashed a garbage can over his head.
“We all knew Adam was hardcore,” Tiszenkel said, referring to Grayson’s day job running a porn Web site, “but we didn’t know he was that hardcore.”
After Sheldon laid waste to Grayson, Christopher Rizzo stood up, kicked Sheldon in the stomach, and power-bombed him through a table. The cult lifted him out of the rubble and carried him from the room.
The other trademarks of Sheldon’s campaigns were the posters he plastered across campus. Ranging from wrestling jargon (“YOU VIOLATED ME AUSTIN!”) to pop-culture references (“Evil Dave. Featuring DMX, Method Man, Redman and Mya”) to the obscure (“The fish was broiled, for sure”), the only thing the signs have in common are that they have nothing to do with normal ASG fare.
‘HIS OWN WAY AND STYLE’
The cult began senior year expecting Sheldon to resist taking another stab at the presidency.
“We thought we’d done everything we could do, and anything else would be cheapening it,” Tiszenkel said.
But Evil Dave, no doubt using his powers of persuasion for good, convinced them to go for one last hurrah.
Tiszenkel said the extra year of campaigning paid off when Sheldon found himself in a run-off election with Manu Bhardwaj, Weinberg ’00. Although Bhardwaj had garnered 43 percent of the vote, compared to Sheldon’s 23 percent, the cult was confident their man would pull out the victory.
The three candidates excluded from the run-off all endorsed Sheldon, and he reigned victorious in the second vote.
But after the victory celebrations, Sheldon had only a few weeks’ reign before graduation. The shortness of his tenure kept him from fulfilling his goal of returning the Lakefill to its rightful owners, the People of the Lake.
“My plan was to introduce legislation asking that the administration give back the Lakefill,” he said. “But I didn’t have enough time to lobby or to line up shovels or anything.”
But Sheldon said even though his reign was short, it was definitely worth the work he put into winning it.
And as strange as it may sound, two-term speaker of the Senate Richard Caldarone said Sheldon steered ASG out of a quagmire when he was elected president.
“He came in after a year where everything was shattered from the beginning and, in his own way and style, he got everyone working together again,” Caldarone said.
