Update: Woaaaah, as it turned out the senator, Mumper, was an absolute crazy person. Here’s an excerpt from my dad in the form of an e-mail that went around after the fact talking about the event…
“Larry Mumper managed to blame the economic crisis on Jimmy Carter and the current Democratic congress, and on ACORN.
…and had the nerve to try and tell us that Obama is actually a Muslim; he read that on a website!” (Seriously. He kept saying this. He then started freaking out and reciting the address, starting with the http.)
“In response, Congressman AuCoin pointedly said, in reference to Mumper’s Obama-Muslim tag, that Mumper’s assertion was offensive because (1) there are bunches of patriotic Muslims and (2) Obama isn’t one anyhow. There was spontaneous applause for both those points, the only such applause.
How bad was Mumper? Here’s an anecdote involving an active College Republican:
I left a few mins early to photocopy lab handouts (missed “closing statements”)...I have a student in my Bio101 lab which started at 1:00, Jeremiah Wagner, who is big-time College Republican, with stickers on his laptop, seated front and center at the event, all very good…Jeremiah said to me at the start of class that I had left too early, because I missed him (Jeremiah) apologizing to Les AuCoin for Mumper’s behavior. That was heartfelt and appropriate. Hats off to Jeremiah, our plainly decent and fair-minded “opposition” student organization principal.”