Libertarian Pride!
Bay area Libertarians kicked off summer with a strong presence at San Francisco's biggest party: Pride.
Under the banner of the Outright Libertarians of the San Francisco Bay Area, organized by local Outright chair Rob Power, we had an Operation Politically Homeless booth for two days and a solid parade contingent.
Pride is funded in part by your tax dollars, so it's officially a non-partisan event. (What that really means, of course, is that only certain political points of view are acceptable.) To avoid any potential problems, it was decided that Outright Libertarians should be the participating organization, rather than a political party; the local chapter is also bay-area-wide, rather than limited to the city.
Due to bureaucratic bungling, our booth was moved at the last minute. Serendipitously, the new location was in the middle of the high-traffic food court, which brought us lots of traffic. Nearly 400 people took the World's Smallest Political Quiz, which generated over 100 leads. A couple of people joined the party on the spot.
As usual at Pride, most of the quiz-takers scored liberal or libertarian. There seemed to be a few more libertarian dots than liberal dots, and most of the liberal dots seemed to be in the upper area of the liberal section, verging on libertarian.
We mounted a solid parade contingent for the second year in a row, nearly doubling the size of last year's group, thanks to participation from several members of the East Bay Libertarian Party. Michael Denny could not appear as a candidate for mayor, again due to the supposedly non-partisan nature of the event, but he did have a lovely convertible (thanks to Dave Barker) to ride in as Secretary of the local Outright Libertarians.
Rob Power took a number of great pictures of the event, and has posted them on his Web site: http://www.robpower.com/gallery/pride2k3.
Thanks to all the volunteers who helped out with this event: Mike Acree, Ted Arbuckle, Dave Barker, Marcy Berry, Eric Brenner, Curt Cornell, Steve Dekorte, Mike Denny, Françoise Fielding, Terry Floyd, Tim Hansen, Lauren Jantz, Chris Maden, Celine Mui, Jim O'Meara, Rob Power, Lisa Ringer, Kurt Schultz, Kelly Simpson, Starchild, Scott Wilson, and Richard Winger.