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September 27, 2015 10:38 AM UTC

CU Student Government Revolts Over GOP Debate Access

  • 10 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
CU-Boulder's Coors Events Center.
CU-Boulder’s Coors Events Center.

As the Boulder Daily Camera’s Sarah Kuta reports:

University of Colorado students are frustrated that they won’t be able to attend the Republican presidential debate being held on their campus and are banding together this week to demand that more tickets be made available.

Late Thursday night, the CU Student Government passed a special resolution chiding the university, the Republican National Committee and CNBC, the cable news channel that’s broadcasting the debate, for making just 50 tickets available to the university community.

The Oct. 28 debate is being held at the Coors Events Center, which can seat more than 10,000 people. But the audience will be capped at roughly 1,000, with a small fraction of those seats going to university students, faculty and administrators…

The CU Student Government resolution calls for a “drastic” increase in the number of tickets available to students and the community and states that if the Republican National Committee and CNBC refuse to do so, the university should no longer be involved with the event. [Pols emphasis]

We’ve been watching the controversy over the highly limited seating available for the October 28th Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus build over the last few weeks like a ticking…on second thought, let’s go ahead and avoid that analogy. But as soon as it was announced that only a small fraction of the available seats at CU-Boulder’s Coors Events Center would be filled at all, and that of those few seats only a token number would go to CU students, we predicted that decision would result in much more controversy than it was worth to the GOP’s image.

That is, unless having an open and accessible debate full of CU students really would be a disaster for the GOP’s slate of presidential candidates. That’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the foremost reason this budding controversy is so bad for Republicans is that everybody knows why they’re not letting CU students attend in any significant numbers.

“We have requested more, but we anticipate that few, if any, will be forthcoming,” wrote CU-Boulder spokesman Ryan Huff in an email. “We understand that this is primarily a television event and CNBC has limited the audience of the 11,000-seat Coors Events Center to about one-tenth of capacity due to the set-up of the stage, lighting, camera equipment, etc.”

He said the university will soon be releasing information about a student watch party on campus.

Sean Spicer, chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee, reiterated on Friday that the debate is a televised event not meant for a live audience… [Pols emphasis]

Obviously, if the event is “not meant for a live audience,” why hold it in a stadium? Why have 1,000 mostly hand-picked people there at all? This excuse just plain doesn’t make sense, and the idea that the stage and broadcast equipment for the debate is going to fill up 10,000 seats in the Coors Events Center is silly on its face.

The Donald and Jeb!
The Donald and Jeb!

The real problem, as we all know, is that putting the current slate of Republican presidential candidates in front of anything other than a hand-picked audience of Republican Party loyalists risks demonstrating how out of touch many of them are–simply by hearing the audience’s reactions. As we’ve said, we don’t accept the argument that students would be inappropriately rowdy. This is about fully appropriate gasps and boos that would come in response to any number of recent on-record statements by Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb! Bush, and the rest of the crew.

The need to preserve a veneer of respectability for a group of presidential aspirants more of less devoted to embarrassing themselves, their party, and the entire nation in the eyes of the world–and folks, that is really what’s going on here, no hyperbole–is putting the University of Colorado in an ugly exclusionary position with their own students. The best choice would probably have been for CU President and GOP kingpin Bruce Benson to have passed altogether on bringing these clowns to the “People’s Republic of Boulder” under terms dictated by the Republican National Committee. Somebody in a strategy meeting had the super-crafty idea of holding a GOP debate in Boulder, and didn’t think through all the things that would mean.

But it’s too late now. The train wreck is underway.

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10 thoughts on “CU Student Government Revolts Over GOP Debate Access”

  1. The parking lot/tailgate protests should be tons o' fun. Or, if the RNC and CU choose to fence off the publicly owned parking lot so that protesters can't get in, again, we're looking at a made-for-TV media spectacle: Cops in riot gear facing off against diverse, chanting, sign-holding protesters exercising their first amendment rights to protest on public property.

    If the parking lot is made off-limits, protests would be shifted to adjoining streets and the mall, and then these types of confrontations would happen on public streets.

    If we accept the rationale for excluding most students, i.e.,  that this is primarily a televised event for a national audience, CU students and Boulderites can certainly manage to stage alternate events for that national audience, and stream them on alternate channels. I trust the population of Boulder and the metro area to take care of that.  It would almost certainly be more entertaining and enlightening than watching the dozen or so (by late October) candidates try to out-Tea Party each other on camera.

    Many would even watch a real debate – How hard would it be to have a "shadow" debate? Find articulate, informed young conservatives, independents, and progressives to stand on a stage and actually discuss substantive policy on immigration, the economy, the drug war, foreign policy, and whatever else the GOP candidates refuse to discuss.

    Whatever happens, October 28 will be an interesting night.

     

     

    1. Who's got the popcorn concession? Modster will no doubt return Monday with his standard cliches about why there's nothing to see here but if the student watch party manifests itself as a massive street protest, of course it  will get lots of media coverage.

      The third debate, being third, doesn't promise to be nearly as interesting in itself as the first two. It's beginning to look like the media is (finally) getting bored with The Donald and Fiorina's 15 minutes seem to be over. Carson can be counted on to say ridiculous things but he's not exactly Mr. Excitement in the way he says them. No number of exclamation points can make anything about Jeb! exciting TV.

      So noisy students protesting not being allowed into a nearly empty venue to see the debate on their own campus would provide a great new angle for the media, something to get breathless about. Especially if things get out of hand as they so often do at the state's foremost party campus on the slightest excuse, like winning/losing an important game. The media will be thrilled with the opportunity to show some footage of something besides a stage full of boring candidates saying the same things they've been sayng for months. Thank you RNC.

    1. If you remember what happened with the Ferguson protests, coverage began with alternative citizen journalists live-streaming on college stations. Then, slowly, mainstream media began to show the same videos and photos. Then the story went international.  When it's a big enough story, mainstream news must cover it.

  3. What were they thinking by scheduling all this on campus in Boulder? A chance to show off the three college conservatives on campus in Boulder by placing them front and center (or perhaps center-right) in the audience? (Maybe they'll bus students in from other college Republican chapters in Colorado and Wyoming, as well.) Is Coors really paying all that much so that its name is broadcast throughout the whole damned thing (taking place at the Coors Events Center)?

    Still, I don't see why students think they ought to be allowed to attend in greater numbers. It's not even an educational event! It's more along the lines of paid entertainment–a Mumford & Sons concert, perhaps.

  4. I remember when Al Haig spoke on the CU campus. There were spectacular protests that night. The Moonies (who had a cell at 777 Broadway), were out in force counter protesting, with portable spotlights and a big American flag. They marched in a conga line all chanting in unison.

    One friend put together a document on onion skin paper called the Haig Program, detailing various war crimes and high misdemeanors going back to Vietnam, put on a suit & tucked his hair up in his cap, and began handing it out to everybody in line, including inside the event. The cool thing was, there was no official program, so everybody was taking the real one… well until one of the conservative groups (it was either Students for a Brownshirt America, or else the Young Reactionaries), discovered the ruse. So, they began yelling "Communist! Commie Propaganda". My friend thought quickly and he began yelling "Jesus! Jesus!", so you had these maniacs chasing each other around. "Commie! Jesus!".

    Fun was had by all, except perhaps the Moonies who did a bunch of frothing at the mouth, especially, when someone tried to burn the American flag.

    True story.

  5. Well, they can have a GOP audience that boos a gay soldier, or a student audience that boos everything else that comes out of the clowns' mouths.  Better to stick with no audience at all.

    Freedom of speech is hard for today’s GOP.

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