From the LA Times

“Using sophisticated communications techniques on the Nevada convention floor in Reno, Paul supporters transmitted mass text messaging to maneuver and direct their troops. When Paul appeared to speak, the ovation was thunderous.

At other times they shouted down the convention chair, Sen. Bob Beers. Taken by surprise the convention organizers and the McCain camp, which for instance had no supply of campaign signs to compete with the blizzard of Paul signs, eventually adjourned the convention in chaos without electing any delegates.”

I went to a screening of “Fiat Empire” downtown this past Sunday-half a block away from Loyola’s Water Tower Campus in fact. If you click that link, you can see a running national debt calculator.

As usual, about 20 or so people showed up. On of the guys was the one who I talked about in a previous post as being a member of the John Birch Society, and two other people from the IRS protest. This meeting was especially cool, because the John Birch guy (sorry, I can’t remember his name) is a member of the Chicago Coin Club and brought along examples of real money-gold, silver and copper coins from back when America used to have real money. I didn’t get any pictures of these, but he also brought along some examples of money that has historically been used by different societies. You’ll probably think its boring and well, it kind of is, but that’s all I got pics of, okay?

Like I said on a previous post, Fiat Empire is a very good short (60 min.) film. The entire thing from Google video is below. To repeat, it’s kind of like a bad high school history doc at times, but it also raises several good points-I especially likes the way they connected the idea of 1) the media doesn’t cover inflation or the degraded state of our currency 2) the media doesn’t cover political candidates who don’t raise money precisely because 3) they don’t have the money to purchase advertising and improve the media’s bottom line.

It also features an extensive interview with Ron Paul

You can see the pics I took of some of the more boring money after the jump

Boring-stone money

This is more interesting-in many communist countries, the currency was so degraded that people would actually accept cigarettes as legitimate forms of money. Even today, in American prisons, cigarettes are often exchanged as currency.

This was somewhat interesting to learn: Did you know that the word salary comes from the word salt? The Roman army used to pay its soldiers in salt rations and that’s where the word comes from. People have used salt and pepper as currency throughout all recorded history.

And chocolate money, used by the Aztecs. It was considered extremely valuable because it did not stay ripe for very long. Another interesting thing that I learned is that people would counterfeit the beans by poking a small hole in the shell, taking out the cocoa and filling it with dirt. Counterfeit money has been around for quite a while too, then. You can’t counterfeit gold and silver, though, can you?

To my surprise, I got an email that shows me in the newest lonelantern viral video. My hand is the one right at the beginning holding the “What income tax?” sign, and has been viewed over 5,000 times. My raw footage has only 3 views, unfortunately.

Here’s the link to their Youtube channel.

This was it: The Big Day.  It only happens once a year-April 15th, tax day.  All the last minute filers show up, and the post office at Canal and Harrison at least, enables them by having postal workers standing outside with giant bins so that its just like a drive-thru.  This is the biggest Post Office in Chicago.  It was decent weather, but the wind was absolutely ridiculous.  I don’t know if the video can properly convey how windy it was.  About 25-30 people showed up, despite the cold-there might have been more had the weather cooperated.  And most of us stood out there until the bitter end-about 6:30 until about 10:30.  We had more than 750 copies of “America: From Freedom to Fascism” that we handed out and hundreds of copies of Republic Magazine as well.  I just basically stood in one place and held up a “What Income Tax?” sign for most of the time.  My legs were absolutely killing me at the end.

We also joined forces with some Libertarian Party people who were out handing out petitions to get on the ballot in November-they had better signs.  We had everyone honking their horns-even the post office employees in the giant mail semi-trucks.

Here’s just some raw footage I shot.

See the pictures I took after the break.

This woman was only there for about an hour-holding a “9/11: Inside Job” sign

This was one of three identical two-sided signs.

AFTF=America Freedom to Fascism

The cops were pretty obnoxious-we couldn’t even stand on the sidewalk, we had to stand on the buffer or even in the street, and we couldn’t sit on the concrete on the left of the picture.

Here’s the sign I held.

This guy was holding a portable DVD player showing AFTF on a loop.

CBS showed up but mostly avoided us.  When I turned on the news later that night, I saw that they positioned their cameras so that they wouldn’t film us.

Standing in the middle of the street-dangerous, but effective

handing out literature by the curve

THEFT CAUGHT IN THE ACT!

MORE THEFT

This guy was from the Libertarian Party and was dressed in full Revolutionary War regalia-it was kind of cold so he had a jacket on-you should have seen his shoes

sunset-heavy traffic

I just think this picture looks cool-click to enlarge.  On the left is Gary Franchi, Lone Lantern National Director shooting a film.

“The Fed is a private bank!”

More Libertarian Party people-we got lots of honks

Ahh, it wouldn’t be an anti-government protest without the government coming to break up our fun.  They kicked us out of the middle of the streets because apparently the Post Office was complaining that we were holding up traffic.

“City Operations”

Ron Paul started to tone down his campaign following Super Tuesday; he needed to compete in a primary for his House seat, and frankly, I think he’s just old and probably getting a little tired, even though he still is campaigning, and actively was campaigning in Pennsylvania.  Therefore, my opportunities for participation in his campaign was somewhat limited, so I decided to get involved in some other groups.  I decided to go to a film screening of Aaron Russo’s “America: From Freedom to Fascism.” It was co-sponsored by two groups, Lone Lantern and Restore the Republic, and took place at a local library.

This was definitely an eye-opening experience for me.  It is a powerful indictment against the IRS and neatly sums up the arguments against taxation in a skillful way, before getting a little weaker (artistically, not rhetorically) in diverting into a discussion of the Federal Reserve.  The part about American hero Joe Lewis were just shocking-I had no clue.  Watch the film and you’ll see what I’m talking about if you don’t know.  Or just google it or look it up on Wikipedia.

It was made by the late Aaron Russo, a major Hollywood producer.  He died of cancer in 2007, and made devoted the last of his money and efforts into making the film.

Here is the entire film-Google was given permission by the producers to have it.

See some materials I picked up at the screening:

There was a pretty diverse group of about 30 there-young, old, even some people who did not appear to speak English.  I met a guy from the John Birch society, which was kind of amusing to me.

I also met a guy from Austria who is part of a very small Austrian libertarian organization.  He said libertarianism doesn’t get very much traction in the welfare-state countries like Europe.

There was also an independent artist there who was handing out prints of posters he designed.  Out of all the Ron Paul posters I’ve seen, this one probably takes the cake.  Click to enlarge.

Restore the Republic national director Gary Franchi was there and he was giving away free copies of Republic magazine. They seemed somewhat interesting.  It was founded last July, (2007) inspired by Ron Paul’s campaign.

(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.)

***

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:

***

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.

Frustrated at my failures to make a difference through precinct-leading, I decided to head down to the Ron Paul campaign office. I had heard they needed help making calls before the election Feb. 5th, so I decided to head down there. Why I wanted to put myself through the torture of making calls again, I’m not sure, but I at least wanted to meet other people who were working for Dr. Paul. If for no other reason than to prove to myself that they really exist in Chicago.

I walked in and I noticed two things right off the bat:

1) The signs: Good lord were there signs! The entire office was empty except for two desks with computers and two phones on them. The rest of the office consisted entirely of signs. Little signs, big signs, really big signs, really REALLY big signs. Hundreds, possibly thousands. Sorry, I didn’t know about the Digital Media Lab when I did this, so I don’t have pictures, but it was absolutely unbelievable.

2) An enormous oil-on-canvass painting of Ron Paul which you can see here. Once again, I did not have a camera with me, so I took a picture on my phone, and then later took a picture of the picture on my phone. It looks pretty pathetic, but there is absolutely no way to do justice to how beautiful the painting was anyway. I didn’t even capture it all. It was floor-to-ceiling. Quite simply one of the most impressive pieces of art I have ever seen. And it was a gift from a supporter, who was just inspired to do it on the spur of the moment.

UPDATE:  I found it-it’s by Chicago Artist Caleb O’Connor:

Awesome:

Continue reading about my experiences, and see picture of the stuff I picked up while I was there:

So I walked in and aside from the signs and the painting, there were three guys in there. Two of them were cutting metal wires to stick in the bottom of the yard signs. Another one was on the phones. I asked if I could make calls, and got set up.

To my unending joy, these were not cold calls. They were people who had already donated money to Paul over the internet and now just needed to be reminded to show up on election day, and to make sure to vote not just Ron Paul, but also for the delegates pledged to Ron Paul, as you can see in this script:

office-script

I still have the message memorized. And this time, people actually answered. And they actually supported Dr. Paul. And they actually wanted to talk–and listen. This was definitely about 100 billion times better than cold calling people. I only had one negative experience with a guy who thought I was just a mercenary hired by the campaign to call people. He kept quizzing me on all of Paul’s positions, I passed the test for sure, but he was still skeptical. Paul had money, I tried to tell him, but not THAT much money-to hire people.

It was also tremendously gratifying to be around people who actually understood and cared about issues, and could discuss them intelligently. People would stop into the office at various points of the day, and I would take a break from calling and just talk about Ron Paul and his issues-immigration, abortion, taxes, the fed, the war. It was great.

I also like how everyone seemed to be a conspiracy theorist-one guy had a huge button that said-what else?-”9/11: Inside Job.” Another guy was talking about how he noticed that on WGN they mentioned that there were only three Republicans left in the race, McCain, Huckabee, and Romney. He was convinced that WGN was conspiracizing to prevent people from knowing about Paul. I can’t deny it’s a possibility. He said he’d called WGN’s station manager posing as a Loyola student doing a research project to see what their explanation was. I told him I was a Loyola student doing a research project on the media and he got a kick out of that.

Also, every once and a while, I would call someone who said they tried to vote early and noticed that Ron Paul or his delegates were not on the ballot. It was just entertaining to talk about this kind of stuff.

But going back to how much better it was to call supporters rather than random strangers: You know that saying “Time flies when you’re having fun?” I showed up at 11 AM and didn’t take a single break other than to converse with people or get a drink of water until 6 PM, when it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t had anything to eat all day. For some reason, I didn’t feel hungry, but I still thought that it was probably not good for my health to not have anything to eat. I went to Subway then came back at 6:30 then made calls until 9PM, when we shut it down. I didn’t feel tired or anything. I ended up calling around 600 people.

It was also pretty amazing to see people slowly turning up at the office throughout the day to the point where we went from having 2 people making calls when I showed up to having almost 15 by the time the office shut down and we all went sign-bombing.

***

There was also a ton of campaign stuff at the office, both official and unofficial. Here’s some of it (click on any of the images to enlarge them):

This is a promotional DVD made by ronpaulreveres.com. It’s kind of cheesy, and the production qualities are lame, but it is a pretty good intro to Paul. About 60 minutes of material in total.

This is “Fiat Empire,” an anti-fed documentary which features an extended interview with Ron Paul. This is about 60 minutes long-its pretty good, actually, despite occasionally feeling like a high school history film.

This is a business-card type thing that I thought was interesting, because as you can see, it advertises Ron Paul’s internet strength. It’s a little blurry because the re-sizing didn’t work out too well, but the top half of the card points out that Ron Paul consistently won online polls immediately following virtually every Republican debate. It also points out that he has the most YouTube subscribers and the most myspace friends and meetup members than any other candidate, Dem or Rep.

This is another business-card type of thing advertising something called the Liberty Dollar-an independently coined money made from real gold, silver, or copper. In other words it has real value, unlike paper money. Their offices were recently raided by the feds, if you’re interested.

This is just one of many official campaign literatures-this one deals with students

These are all of the literatures that the office had-veterans, true conservatives, no taxes on tips, pro-life, free enterprise, borders, gun rights, health freedom, and students.

This card I though was very interesting-it does nothing but promote Ron Paul’s Meetup group. You probably can’t see in the fine print on the back that it says, “produced by independent supporters of Ron Paul-NOT affiliated with the Ron Paul PCC.”

And these were posters that I thought were very interesting and artistic. They are unofficial-produced by a company called voteronpaul.com

A guy who showed up a little late was showing off to everyone that he had bought an independent ad on the back page of the RedEye that day-the day after the Super Bowl as you can tell. He said whenever he would talk to people about the election they would say they were either going to vote for Barack Obama or Ron Paul, so he was inspired to run an ad against Obama and for Paul.

I’ve never seen anything quite like that before-attacking a candidate for another party’s nomination from a candidate who is not guaranteed to even secure his own. The add highlights that Obama has not ruled out leaving troops inside Iraq, and Paul, an Air Force veteran, wants to remove all troops unequivocally. The guy was a little pissed because he thought the ad didn’t stick out enough.

These are “tip cards.” I took about 20 of them and the goal is to give them to waiters and waitresses whenever you go to restaurants to spread the word that Ron Paul sponsors a bill that would make tips tax-free. Quite ingenious if you ask me.

office-script

This day really brought the bad/disconnected number issue to an extreme as you can see in the call sheets:

pl4

You might notice I didn’t bother to redact some of the numbers towards the end. Take a closer look. It’s because they’re all the same. And they’re all bad-just one bad number repeated for dozens of people. Something like 20-30 of them. Hell, you can call them yourself: 773-338-7800. That’s how ridiculous it was.

If you haven’t guessed based on the ending to the last post, I never did find another Ron Paul supporter. And you’ll also notice that at the end, I just sort of gave up. I found one Ron Paul supporter out of 400 calls. I didn’t really think it was worth doing the last 30-40 of them, considering that 20 of them would be bad no answer, 5 would be Democrats, and the other 5 would refuse to participate in my little poll.

The most interesting person who I talked to was an African-American man who supported Huckabee, and justified his support of the Iraq War by saying that he had been “overseas” (he didn’t say where) and everything looked fine(!). So he thought that Democrats were somehow creating Iraq as a stunt to make the President look bad. No, really. It’s in my notes on the sheet.

Ultimately, my precinct activities faced several difficult obstacles.

1) Chicago: This is heavily Democratic city-Republicans are about as rare as the black rhino.

2) Technical difficulties: I was having some pretty bad difficulties getting the Ron Paul website to cooperate with me, delaying my calls while I tried to figure out the problems with the databases.

3) Real Estate: Tons of high-rises in my precinct meant it was virtually impossible to go door-to-door, unless I would pose as a resident of one of these apartments, get past security, if any, or just convince a resident to let a total stranger inside. None of this was appealing to me. Later, I would talk to people who actually have done this type of thing-they didn’t like it either.

4) The Weather: For some reason, this year was an unusually cold winter, the primary was on Feb. 5th, and there was no way I was going out door-to-door.

There is no doubt that real person-to-person contact through door-to-door canvassing is the most effective way to do the grassroots work I was doing, but as the above mitigating circumstances show, this was highly difficult. If I had to do it again, I might actually have tried sneaking into buildings, if for no other reason than it would have been an adventure and I would have had good stories to tell on this blog.

I also kind of felt bad for carrying water for the RNC. I don’t support the Republican Party and it sends a cold chill down my spine that I might have been helping them to update their records and therefore making their political organization more efficient, no matter in how small a way.

Moral of the story: COLD CALLING SUCKS! DO NOT DO THIS! ANYTHING BUT THIS!

BUT, there is a better way, as you will find out in my post on my day at the Ron Paul campaign office.

I can’t really say what initially caused me to want to be a precinct leader for Ron Paul. I had no idea what it was, and I certainly had no idea what I was getting myself into. The major lesson I learned from this experience is that cold calling people-particularly about politics-is the worst job in the entire world. I doubt I would have gotten a worse reaction if I was trying to telemarket root canals.

So basically what we have right here is a “script” that we were supposed to use:

phone-script

This is a non-advocacy script, meaning you don’t identify yourself as a Ron Paul supporter. The whole goal of this sort of thing is just to identify supporters of the various candidates. The main responses I was interested in were whether someone was already a Ron Paul supporter, what issues were important to them, or whether they were undecided. This is known as the “identification” stage.

Here are the call sheets I used:

pl11

I was extraordinarily nervous about cold-calling people. I finally managed to get over my fear, and called the first person right from the comfort of my own apartment. He answered-all good so far. So I asked him if he wanted to answer a quick survey about the upcoming election. He told me he’s at work and can’t answer questions right now.

I have no idea why this was so discouraging, but I literally did not call another person for another 3 days. Just one call, and I was already sick of it. I hate talking to strangers. Even worse, I hate feeling like I’m annoying people. That’s what this was. Was anyone going to answer? Was I just going to be annoying everyone? Eventually, once again I worked over my fear (after several days) and managed to call the second person.

No answer. Third person. Bad number. Fourth person. Bad number. I quickly learned another lesson: I’m working with Republican National Committee documents. In Chicago. The most Democratic area of a state that went heavily Democratic in 2004. Republicans probably haven’t been here in YEARS. Ron Paul is technically a Republican, and therefore relies on their documents.

All of my fear evaporated. Calling numbers and hearing that sweet sound “the number you have dialed is no longer in service” over and over and over again just made me happy. It was just comical. Why on earth was I so scared? This is easy! Every once in a while I would get a hold of someone and ask them if they wanted to take a survey. They usually declined or told me they were voting for a Democrat. Dozens and dozens of calls, no answers, bad numbers, hang-ups, and Democrats. I had recently seen a poll that showed Ron Paul at 5% in Illinois. I had to get at least 5 out of 100 right?

Eventually though, my fear was replaced with sheer frustration. No one even wanted to answer the damn survey. I tried the non-advocacy angle. I tried flat-out identifying myself as a Ron Paul supporter, since I thought the non-advocacy stuff was dishonest. Either way nothing much happened. One woman I called pretty much summed it up: When I told her I was working for Congressman Paul, she said “Oh I’m not voting for him. He’s kind of a quack.” I said I wasn’t trying to convince her, just trying to identify his supporters and she said “Well, you can’t count on me,” and then hung up.

Well, I had made 99 calls, and my 100th call appeared to be yet another “no answer.” I hung up and was in the process of calling someone else when I got a call back from the number I just hung up on. I wasn’t too enthusiastic. This was actually the first time anyone who I called had called back, and I told him that I was a precinct leader fro Ron Paul and I was just calling to try to identify his supporters. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I’m a big supporter of Dr. Paul. I think he’s got a lot of great ideas.”

CELEBRATION!!!! I told him thank God, you’re the first guy I found who actually likes the guy-on exactly my 100th call. He said Paul was doing pretty good in the Rogers Park neighborhood. I asked him if he needed any materials, he said he already had some. We said goodbye. I called my mom, I was so excited.

I called a few more people, got about the same stuff I was getting before, but I was too hyped up to keep going. Nothing gave me heart more than finding that guy. You can see my excitement in the note next to his name. That had made my whole day worth it.

It would turn out to be the high point of my efforts at precinct leading.

TO BE CONTINUED…Part 2

So you want to be a Ron Paul precinct leader. Well here goes. It basically involves three steps: Identification, Conversion and “get out the vote.”

Here is how the Ron Paul website described the Identification process:

Voter ID is as easy as contacting the voters on your precinct list, either by phone or in person, and asking them a few simple survey questions. Although it takes time to contact each voter on your list, it’s not at all difficult.

We recommend that you start your voter ID by phone and then finish it up by going door-to-door to the voters you weren’t able to reach by phone.

There are three types of voters on your list. The purpose of the Voter ID survey is to help you find out as quickly and easily as possible which category each voter belongs to.

The three categories are Ron Paul supporters, supporters of other candidates, and undecided voters. Think of the three categories as the Saints, the Sinners, and the Searching.

Aww, that’s cute.

So the Saints are “the voters in your precinct who already support Ron Paul. You may not know who they are yet, but they’re out there. Down the street, around the corner, a block over – the Ron Paul revolution is simmering behind lots of doors in your neighborhood.”

The Sinners “are the voters in your precinct who support any candidate other than Ron Paul. Don’t be tempted to try to convince these voters to support to Dr. Paul: once you’ve identified a “Sinner,” don’t waste any more of your precious time or literature on them…If a “sinner” strongly supports an opposing candidate and sees you organizing to win your precinct for Dr. Paul, they may decide to start organizing voters for their candidate. Stay clear of the sinners entirely, once you know who they are.”

The Searching “are the undecided voters who are still looking for the candidate who best addresses their concerns. If you follow the survey script we provide for Voter ID, once you’ve finished with Step 1, you’ll know exactly which issues are the most important to every undecided voter in your precinct.”

So to sum up: “ Voter ID is the reconnaissance of political warfare. When going into battle, you, and Ron Paul headquarters, need to know how many troops we have, how many more we might raise, and how large the enemies’ forces are.”

Continue Reading about my exciting adventures:

SO after the ID, comes the “conversion” stage. This is for the “searching” who identified certain issues that would make them amenable to possibly voting Paul.

Here’s how the Ron Paul site describes it:

The target here is undecided voters. Any voter who firmly supports another candidate isn’t worth one more moment of your time. If you spent hours wining and dining them, you may get them to change their mind. But we’re after the low-hanging fruit here: people with a general indifference toward the other candidates who will find out about Ron Paul and like him instantly.

Voter conversion is done essentially the same way as voter identification–by phone and door-to-door–except this time, rather than gathering data, your goal is to convince every person that Ron Paul is the candidate who would best serve their goals as President.

Oh yeah and one somewhat minor point:

Voter consversion is far, far more effectively done after voter ID. Voter ID will make the size of your list in this step much, much smaller with the people that aren’t worth your time removed.

That will be somewhat important as we find out later.

Here’s the table of issues they showed us:

And you have to love the optimism:

As you can see from the table, Dr. Paul agrees with almost everybody on every issue except those where more governing would be required. This makes his platform an easy sell–nobody really likes the government–so long as you know what issues your voter is concerned with.

Then of course the final step is “get out the vote” in which you contact all the people you’ve identified and converted to vote Paul and make sure they get to the polls.

Two days before Election Day, you’ll want to call or leave a note with every Ron Paul voter on your list, reminding them that ELECTION DAY IS AROUND THE CORNER and to call you if they need any assistance getting to vote. This is very important–a lot of voters will forget, or be stuck at work, etc. unless they’re reminded. And finally, on Election Day itself, stand as close to your polling place as the law allows, and hand out your favorite slim jim to every voter.

Sounds simple right? NOT!!! See precinct leading days 1 and 2