College Republicans Meeting

The meeting I went to was the SJU College Republicans, which was mostly boring except for a discussion at the very end.

To advertise for the meeting, the group put up posters with Obama’s face as the Joker with the time and place on it. It managed to upset some people, as the posters were removed and a school wide discussion on them was scheduled for next week. However, some people who were upset with the poster decided the show up to this meeting to complain about them.

At the end of the meeting, there was an open floor and one girl, who identified herself as a Democrat  asked who was responsible for the posters and voiced her displeasure with them. The head of the Republicans said that they were put up because of the group’s dislike of Obama’s policies. At this point another Democrat said the picture was propaganda, which caused most of the crowd to begin yelling at him.

To calm the crowd down, another member of the College Republicans stood up and took credit for designing the poster, and defended it by once again stressing that it was in response to Obama’s policies, specifying Obama’s economic policies and healthcare plan when one of the Democrats asked. One of the Democrats in the audience called the poster propaganda again, which caused another round of the entire crowd yelling over each other, with many audience members defending the poster since similar pictures of Bush as the Joker were made last year.

Before anything else could happen, the head of the Republicans ended the debate by saying that the meeting was not designed for debate on the poster and that there was a time already set up for that to occur. He asked that in the future College Republicans meetings be kept to Republicans and not platforms for the opposition to debate them.