Our goal for the day was to hit the lines for returns at Best Buy, but apparently the rush for post-Christmas returns isn't as big as the Black Friday Christmas sales. Daniel, Aaron and I headed for the intersection near the mall and set up camp for the day. We took over the snow mounds at all four corners (public property) and got started on the real project for the day: sign waving and soliciting for honks.
Not a whole lot of success early on - people tend to keep their eyes on the road when there's but a pithy three supporters spread across the intersection, but around 11 AM the reinforcements arrived: about twenty-five of us strewn across the intersection waving signs.
By the end of the day, maybe ten thousand cars passed through the intersection. People were very excited to honk at Vijay's "I'M FREEZING FOR YOUR FREEDOM!" sign, and almost everyone was supportive. The secret is getting out that Ron has far greater support than the polls would have you believe. We gave out more than 300 Ron Paul lawn signs in about eleven hours or so, spoke with 100-200 interested but undecided voters while they waited at stoplights, and gave out a few hundred slim jims. Overall, a very successful mission.
Some other interesting news: also joining in the fun by around mid afternoon, were the McCain supporters. All six of them. To their credit, they were pretty excited to try and crash the Revolution, hoping, I suppose, to prove the strength of their candidate in the streets.
What did we do? We converted them.
Well, we tried, at least. I certainly wouldn't call them particularly knowledgeable about their candidate's positions, but they were willing to engage in conversation and argument, which is commendable. By the end they were really quiet, probably because they didn't have much ammunition with which to argue McCain's stance on the Iraq War, immigration, campaign finance reform, etc. They were also getting very discouraged out there, because McCain did show some support, but nothing like the excitement or numbers that we were drawing. They trudged off a couple of hours after they showed up - we were there another four.
Hopefully they show up again, and hopefully they'll be waving Paul signs.
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