(This is not my picture-just an example. It belongs to the Wheeling, IL meetup)
After the office shut down the calling, there was a meetup in the lobby of the office-well, the lobby was the office. Just to give you a little idea of the power of meetup, 5 people signed up for the meeting and around 20 showed up. We had hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, signs. We originally thought we would only be able to bomb a few precincts, but we ended up being able to hit every single one we targeted. (Once again, the lack of a camera on my part means no pictures. Sorry.)
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Timeout: What is sign-bombing? Check out the picture above and you’ll get an idea. It’s basically a strategy to maximize visibility for something in people’s minds, mainly by having lots and lots of signs. People need to be aware of Ron Paul before they will consider voting for him. As far as I’m aware, Ron Paul supporters created the term.
Here’s a great video showing what its about-they’re protesting Rudy Giuliani, a favorite target of Paulites.
Here’s are two other great examples from local news broadcasts:
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So the guy who was organizing it said that we were specifically targeting the lakeshore precincts because they had an unusually high number of registered independents. Our plan was just to put as many signs as possible outside each voting place the night before the election. I went out with this guy whose name I can’t remember-but he had a car, so it worked out.
The rule is 100 feet from the polling place, but we don’t like rules. Our precinct was right on the lakeshore. It was dark and I’m not too familiar with neighborhoods in Chicago, but eventually it dawned on me that we were actually sign bombing Loyola-Chicago’s precinct. We left about 5 signs or so outside of every polling place in the precinct-all different sizes. Some precincts were doubles or even triples-they got lots of signs. There was an enormous snow pile right next to a polling place at Loyola and we put an even more enormous sign on top of it.
We were competing with a bunch of local candidates, so we needed to have a bunch of signs. One thing I noticed was that no other presidential candidate had any signage-Republican or Democrat. We finished at Loyola around 1AM. I was riding the L past campus and was horrified to see that all of our signs were gone, along with all the signs of the local candidates-except for Joe Berrios.
Little hint, Joe-when your signs are the only ones left, it’s not hard to figure out who tore the other ones down.
But otherwise, this was definitely fun.
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