Diamondback Online - The University of Maryland's Independent Daily Student Newspaper

Issue date: 4/15/08 Section: News

Oprah Winfrey is promoting Barack Obama, Steven Spielberg is backing Hillary Clinton and Heidi Montag from The Hills is supporting John McCain.

But for two of the Student Government Association presidential candidates, celebrity endorsements don't get much bigger than Terrapin men's basketball players Bambale Osby and Greivis Vasquez. The Terps are supporting SGA presidential candidates Jonathan Sachs and Mardy Shualy, respectively.

YouTube videos featuring the high-profile athletes appear on each candidates' website in an effort to boost the hopefuls' own campaigns and raise the visibility of the election as a whole.

According to his website, SGA presidential candidate Dan Leydorf is endorsed by the university cheerleading squad, and members of the team were doing lifts and cartwheels at his bake sale fundraiser yesterday.

Both Sachs and Shualy independently approached Osby and Vasquez in the weeks leading up to the campaign about filming the commercials.

Sachs' ad, a spoof of the GEICO commercials that use celebrities to tell the stories of "real people," shows Sachs and Osby sitting in a South Campus Commons apartment. Sachs makes the typical campaign pitch, followed by Osby who tells voters that Sachs is "the James Gist of getting it done."

"We were looking for something that was going to draw people to our site," Sachs said. "The video with Boom was to get people excited about it, and it worked."

Osby got hooked into appearing in the commercial through a mutual friend who sold him on the idea. One of the Terps' starters this season, Osby said he saw the endorsement as a way to become more involved in campus activities.

"A lot of people don't take this seriously enough. People looking at the ad on the website will probably get more people involved," Osby said. "And hopefully, it will get people more involved in the real election. I don't know the statistics, but people from 18 to 24 don't vote for nothing."

In the HOUSE Party commercial, Shualy tells viewers "I was born to play basketball" before having multiple shots emphatically blocked by Vasquez in a game of one-on-one.

After getting pummeled, Shualy, dressed in a suit, attempts to defend the 6-foot-6 guard. Vasquez drains a jumper over Shualy before dunking on the SGA presidential candidate.

"It was about a week and a half before campaigning," Shualy said about the decision to approach Vasquez. "We were just brainstorming ideas for the video and we were talking about people who would raise the visibility and would be entertaining. Naturally, the idea of a basketball player came up."

Continued...

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