Inside Higher Ed has a story about the recent student elections at Penn State, which ended up with the winning candidates being belatedly rejected after making inappropriate comments:
Jay Bundy won a plurality of votes in last week's campus election and was poised to take over leadership of the University Park Undergraduate Association, recognized by university administrators as being the official voice of students. Soon after the election, Bundy and his running mate, Christopher Brink, both juniors, were told by the elections commission that they had won the vote count.
Later in the week, Bundy was quoted in Penn State's student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, as saying that "if the students are stupid enough to vote for someone as inappropriate and retarded as I am, then they deserve a president who is going to give the worst performance to the best of his ability." He later added in the interview that "you voted for me, bitches. That was a bad idea."
The official line is that they were disqualified for procedural violations and financial irregularities, which hadn't been fully investigated before the votes were counted. You can guess how credible the principals find this.
The thing about this story is that it's just such a lame way to get bounced. If you're going to run a joke campaign for student government and then get yourself thrown out, at least try to do it with style, like the Pail and Shovel Party. "[Y]ou voted for me, bitches" has to be the sorriest set of political last words this side of Marion Barry's "Bitch set me up."
(Of course, Barry came back after that one, so maybe there's hope for these guys...)
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Coffee time discussion have been getting interesting recently though.
For an additional twist, he was just arrested for a misdemeanour.
Ahh the Pail and Shovelers! I was a sophmore in 79 at Madison - what a government!
They also handed out a diploma to all entering freshmen saying that this would take the pressure off and they could party now. Plus I think they tried to sell the University of Wisconsin name to Rutgers or something like that, since they were a state university without a state name.
Many of the students actually thought we got more worth out P&S than any other Student Government we could have had.
Yeah, check out him bragging about being arrested, not to mention all the stunts he pulled during the debate. If I could include images, I'd post Fark's "attention whore" cliche here.
I have to agree, the stunts pulled at PSU are always crass. Other schools have intelligent pranks and humor with class...
Would that we could do this at the national level. "You voted for me, bitches" sounds to me much like our president talking about his mandate.
As an undergraduate we ran a dog for student body President. Sadly, he was disqualified for not possessing a current student id.
A more tasteful version of this was done at Illinois a few years ago. A group ran on a platform that promised to dismantle student government. They won the general election but were disqualified on a lame technicality.