Thursday, March 18, 2010

Report from BAP Event March 7

The Golden Gate Objectivists had a good showing at the Bay Area Patriot event in Marin on March 7th. About 30 groups had tables - we were featured right next to the speaker podium, where we were very visible to the about 500 people who attended the event. We handed out over 150 Ayn Rand Samplers, all 100 of our 'Man's Right' and 'America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business' pamphlets, as well as a big stack of essays advocating free-market health care reform. We also had over 20 people sign up to join our GGO mailing list: welcome to all of you, and we hope to see you again at one of our next events.

While most of the candidate speakers at the event were mixed or rather bad, we did connect with at least one potentially interesting candidate: John Dennis, who is running in the Republican Primary as a potential challenger for Nancy Pelosi, spoke quite emphatically on the importance of defending individual rights. In conversations after his talk, a few Golden Gate Objectivists found him to be surprisingly principled: he advocates phasing out entitlements, a free-market direction for health care reform, and an ultimate abolishment of the Fed. He also is well-read in Ayn Rand - admiring her not just for her politics of capitalism, but stating that he found her impressive for 'her fundamental identification that in the end, politics comes down to a person's views in epistemology and metaphysics.' Definitely a politician worth investigating: if someone with these views can have a good run against Nancy Pelosi, maybe we can have some real change soon!

Thank you also to Sally Zelikovski, who put this very professionally organized event together!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I wish we had stayed longer now!

I thought there was too much going on in too loud of an environment for presenting ideas to people. Initially, I was disappointed, as presenting Objectivist ideas was my original intent in participating.

What I found valuable at the event was the presentations by candidates. It was surprisingly useful to hear candidate present their platforms in person (or by proxy) rather than trying to glean information from media sources, web sites, and news releases.

John Dennis is one of the candidates I've been very interested in and have considered actively supporting. I'm glad you had an opportunity to speak with him, and wish I had (still) been there!