After watching the Feb. 25 Student Senate presidential debate, I thought this year’s campaign might be kind of a yawn.

There was no divisive referendum like last year, and many of the candidates started their debate “rebuttals” with the phrase, “I’d like to agree with (insert candidate’s name here).”

The only indication of any discord whatsoever came from the crowd, as a few Student Senators grumbled their displeasure at the ideas of presidential candidate Bob Bourgeois and his running mate, Lindsey Nelson.

But all of that changed Tuesday as mysterious pieces of hot-pink paper began to make their way around campus.

I didn’t even notice the thing at first. Mindlessly and sleepily heading to my 9:30 a.m. class, I grabbed whatever literature the eager campaigners on the Campus Mall were thrusting at me. It was only after I sat down with a few minutes to kill that I noticed what the flier was screaming at me:

“Why Bob and Lindsey are NOT the correct choice for Student Body President and Vice President!”

Disbelieving, I began to read this piece of what can only be described as blatant attack advertising. I knew there had been some concerns among those in Senate that Bourgeois and Nelson, a pair with no Senate experience, would win the election.

Their concern was a valid one. The anonymous, petty way in which they approached it was not.

The flier raised some decent points in a bunch of bad ways, often reminding the potential voter that the election was not a popularity contest with such bitter-sounding phrases as “This election is NOT Homecoming!” and “The purpose is to find the most qualified people, not the people with the most friends or connections!”

Throughout the campaign, Senate was bristling at charges of elitism, the idea that Senate is an “exclusive club,” rather than a representative and inclusive body.

I’ve covered Senate and I know many of the senators; I even live with one. The organization is by no means an “exclusive club.”

But the flier only served to perpetuate that myth with phrases such as “The Statesmen have Homecoming, but the students have Student Senate!”

This only serves to exacerbate the exclusivity stereotype, while simultaneously drawing the utterly bizarre conclusion that the Singing Statesmen are not, in fact, students. Hmmm.

And while the flier itself left a bad taste in my mouth, its anonymous nature was perhaps the worst thing about it.

The official word from Senate was that the flier was in no way affiliated with the campaigns of either Chad Wade and Meredith Marx or Scott Olson and Dawn Snyder. Be that as it may, the student body had the right to know who was disseminating this attack advertising.

If you’re a group of concerned senators, then say so up front, rather than shoving a flier into the hands of students while repeatedly mumbling some enigmatic phrase such as “something interesting to read.”

In fact, in what turned out to be a fairly close election – Wade and Marx beat Bourgeois and Nelson by just 60 votes – such negative advertising could actually have had the opposite of its intended effect. It could have turned students away from what they might have perceived to be negative campaigning on the part of one or both of the Senate tickets.

It’s not that whoever put out the flier has invalid concerns. But rather than shallowly attacking another ticket, they should have made concrete, issue-oriented arguments that they were willing to own up to.

Kudos to outgoing Senate President Adrian Klenz and Vice President Kate Demerse for not stooping to this level. The pair wrote a well-reasoned, well-argued and mature letter to the editor, which was published in Thursday’s issue of The Spectator.

In it, they intelligently addressed some of the concerns and frustrations Senate had been dealing with as its members wondered if an “outsider” would take office. Klenz and Demerse avoided name-calling. They calmly used statistics and solid, well-informed information to make their point. And they weren’t anonymous.

This is the way to make yourself heard. Standing in the shadows and making personal attacks isn’t.