It was a last minute shift, but better later than never. At the last meetup of the Alameda County City Chairs in Oakland the issue of the upcoming tea party event came up but nothing was resolved. The day of the event, Kurt Kleier called me and said to coordinate with Courtney Chipman and Joe Cadelago on doing a Meg Whitman booth at the tea party event at the Alameda Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.
So I got out there at 11:00 am to help set up a booth. Courtney, Joe and I got the booth together and were ready to pass out Meg's brochures and bumper stickers by the 12:30 pm opening time. Even more importantly, we pushed a sign up list in order to get more volunteers for Meg.
Our booth was right next to Carly Fiorina's. These people were really dressed for success. We merely wore Meg T shirts and jeans, so we fit in much better with the Tea Party crowd. The news outlets had said there would be 7000 people there, and they were exactly right. While Meg was not to appear at the Tea Party, Carly Fiorina did appear and got a great reception from the crowd. Carly was playing to the right this day, I can only hope she stays on that path.
There were only 2 chairs, so Courtney and Joe got to sit down. I stood the whole time but this was a good thing. We had a line of from 2 to 5 people waiting to talk to us all the way to the end of the event at 7:00 pm. I broke into the line at the rear to take care of everyone's questions before they got tired of waiting and left. Got to say that many of the Tea Party are a bit skeptical of Meg. The most asked question was how deep was Meg's previous support of Babs Boxer. Joe said Meg supported only Boxer's internet related bill, not Boxer herself. Most questioners were satisfied with that, but Meg will have to speak herself on that now and then to get Tea Party support. By 7:00 pm we had the names of 80 people, at least 40 of which would like to volunteer for Meg.