Shortly before the election, we learned that the College Republican National Committee was, in its best Enron imitiation, cheating grandparents out of their money.
The College Republican National Committee has raised $6.3 million this year through an aggressive and misleading fund-raising campaign that collected money from senior citizens who thought they were giving to the election efforts of President Bush and other top Republicans.
Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks — sometimes hundreds and, in at least one case, totaling more than $100,000 — to groups with official sounding-names such as “Republican Headquarters 2004,” “Republican Elections Committee” and the “National Republican Campaign Fund.”
But all of those groups, according to the small print on the letters, were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks. And little of the money went to election efforts.
Since then, the youngest generation of the “family values” party has been facing growing pressure over the College Republicans’ unscrupulous fundraising tactics.
Many donors complained that they thought the money was going directly to the Republican Party, and not to the college group, which is no longer affiliated with the GOP. The controversy over the letters has produced angry responses from leaders of state College Republican chapters, including those in Washington state, North Carolina and New York.
The University of Washington College Republicans approved a resolution calling on Eric Hoplin, chairman of the national committee, “to take full responsibility for his actions,” acknowledge that those actions have substantially harmed the College Republicans grass-roots organization and “promptly resign.”
Dan Centinello, New York College Republicans chairman, complained that the national leaders have not taken prompt and decisive action to correct the situation. “I don’t want to see hard work by all of us be tarnished by a fundraising scandal,” he said.
Too late. The College Republicans have been caught taking advantage of the elderly, raiding their life savings under false pretenses — and there’s no easy way to spin that away.
In the immediate aftermath, [Eric Hoplin, national chairman of College Republicans] e-mailed top state officials of the organization, telling them not to speak to the news media. “We need the story to go away,” he wrote. “The story is full of lies and distortions written by a well-known liberal who is out to get us. If the press asks you about it, tell them you have no comment.”
Hoplin hasn’t pointed to any “lies” or “distortions” from the accounts. I can’t imagine why not.
Worst of all, these College Republicans are the future leaders of the party. We’ll no doubt be seeing similar “pro-family” tactics from these characters for years to come.