Before they became known as RotMan on social media and before their own \u201cattack ad\u201d against themselves was viewed 17,000 times on YouTube, Xavier Rotnofsky and Rohit Mandalapu intended their campaign for, respectively, student body president and vice president at the University of Texas at Austin as a joke, an elaborate way to poke fun at the outsized ambitions and political jockeying that typically characterize student elections. Their platform included bringing a Chili\u2019s to campus and mandating that representatives wear cellophane to increase \u201ctransparency.\u201d At the race\u2019s only debate, Rotnofsky presented the other candidates with roses and a campaign volunteer dressed as a butler served up Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies.<\/p>\n
But to their own surprise, Rotnofsky and Mandalapu inspired\u2014or at least entertained\u2014enough voters to beat their more experienced opponents by eighteen points in a runoff on March 12. Now the duo, editors at the satirical student publication the Texas Travesty, are developing positions on issues they never expected to have to take seriously.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur original intention was never to win\u2014our intention was to be funny,\u201d Mandalapu says over Arnold Palmers at Chili\u2019s (a restaurant that Rotnofsky, at least, doesn\u2019t actually patronize much). The Travesty often fields prankster candidates for student government, and Rotnofsky, a Plan II and linguistics major from Laredo, and Mandalapu, a Plan II and economics major from Sugar Land, volunteered to carry the baton this year. Rotnofsky aspires to become a comedy writer, but the RotMan campaign cheekily emphasized that, like legions of candidates before them, the pair viewed student government as a stepping stone to law school.<\/p>\n
The self-described \u201ctwo good boys\u201d had considered declining the offices if they won, but after talking to their mothers, they decided to honor their landslide mandate. They realized that some students had projected genuine hope and idealism onto them, though they had never encouraged that response. \u201cIn the last two weeks of the campaign, people called us mavericks and reformers, when we weren\u2019t exactly expressing those things,\u201d Rotnofsky says.<\/p>\n
Now they\u2019re considering how to serve the students who voted for them in jest as well as those who expect them to bring about actual change. Between laughs they\u2019re focusing on substantive goals, such as strengthening campaign spending limits, removing the Jefferson Davis statue from the South Mall, and agitating against campus carry laws. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take the roles seriously, but we\u2019re not going to take ourselves seriously,\u201d Rotnofsky explains.<\/p>\n
RotMan, as it turns out, isn\u2019t the first satirical ticket to be elected to UT\u2019s student government. In 1976 the Art and Sausages Party, led by President Jay Adkins and Vice President Skip Slyfield, prevailed with similarly puckish campaign promises. They recommended that the inscription on the Tower change from \u201cYe shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free\u201d to \u201cMoney talks.\u201d A \u201cpublish or pear-ish\u201d policy would have required professors without scholarly publications to dress as giant pears. (Remarkably, neither suggestion went anywhere.)<\/p>\n
Adkins, now an Austin lawyer, says the best thing Rotnofsky and Mandalapu can do for their constituents is demonstrate that it\u2019s okay to be a little strange. \u201cRemind people that it isn\u2019t just \u2018Grind out four years, get the job, move to the burbs, keep your head down,\u2019\u200a\u201d he says. \u201cAnd be funny while you do it, dammit, because anybody can be idealistic and dull. The challenge is to be idealistic and hilarious.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before they became known as RotMan on social media and before their own \u201cattack ad\u201d against themselves was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,89983,89482,4101],"class_list":{"0":"post-233847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-austin","9":"tag-austin-headlines","10":"tag-austin-news","11":"tag-may-2015-issue","12":"tag-the-culture","13":"tag-university-of-texas-at-austin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}