Did anyone notice anything strange at the Ron Paul speech Monday night?
Although I appreciate Accent for bringing the former congressman to UF, I am a little concerned about the way the event was structured.
I admit that I haven’t attended too many Accent events during my time at UF, being a graduate student and all, and I’ve never attended one in the Stephen C. O’Connell Center.
However, I have a few questions I would like to ask Accent about this event.
What’s up with the exclusivity?
There was plenty of room for more chairs on the floor of the O’Connell Center, yet it seemed only members of Accent, Student Government and what I assume was Florida Blue Key sat at ground-level for the event.
Yes, because Accent sponsored the event, they should have had seats closer to Paul. But it’s not like they worked extremely hard to raise all of the money necessary to bring him to UF — we paid the fees Accent used to pay Paul to come.
They could have fit at least 50 to 100 more chairs on the floor instead of making all of us lowly, regular (“unconnected”) students sit in the stands. Of course, not everyone would be able to sit on the floor for the event, but it should have been first come, first served.
Admittedly, I probably would not have been able to sit on the floor given the time I arrived, but I would have rather seen more enthusiastic students who actually wanted to see Paul speak seated there.
Instead, many of the students sitting on the floor appeared to be disinterested in what the speaker had to say. A few even left before the Q-and-A portion of the event.
Classy.
Which brings me to my next question: What gives with the Q-and-A session?
For those who weren’t able to attend, an Accent moderator conducted the Q-and-A with Paul. I was hoping that some of the more enthusiastic audience members would have been able to ask the former congressman questions.
Would it have been logistically impossible to allow audience members to ask questions to Paul? Did he ask that questions come from only one person? (Although, this seems highly improbable.)
Also, who came up with these questions?
At one point, I heard the moderator ask Paul something to the effect of “when did you start to embrace your monetarist viewpoints?” It wasn’t worded exactly like that, but I did pick up on the word “monetarist” as a way of describing Paul’s economic views.
So apparently the moderator googled the words “economics” and “federal reserve” and came up with the “Monetarism” Wikipedia page and decided this phrase encompassed Paul’s views.
Although this economic approach was embraced by free market economists such as Milton Friedman and is critical of the Federal Reserve System, Paul ascribes to the Austrian school of economics. Hint: He talked about it in his speech.
I’ll concede that, to some, this may seem like a minor detail, but it illustrates why having a moderator unfamiliar with Paul’s ideas was probably not the best way to go about the Q-and-A session.
He also asked a few softball questions such as “Who did you dislike the most in the Republican primary?” and “Tell us about hitting a homerun in the congressional baseball game.”
That’s some real hard-hitting stuff.
Again, I don’t know why the event was structured in the manner described, and there might be reasonable justifications for everything, but I felt the audience might have missed out on some better discussion had things been a little different.
Justin Hayes is pursuing a master’s degree in political communication. His column appears on Wednesdays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
