For more than four years a chiropractor, a financial advisor, a sheet metal contractor, a paralegal, a real estate investor and a bisexual prostitute have met every month in a yoga studio on San Francisco’s Sansome Street to discuss a shared interest in small government, modest foreign policy, and antipathy toward the U.S. Federal Reserve.

In August, the group began telephoning voters in Iowa, urging them to support a certain Texas Republican’s presidential campaign.

This week, some members of the group traveled to Iowa to help Congressman Ron Paul win the Jan. 3 Caucuses.

The focus on Iowa represents a strategic shift for the group. Members decided to apply their time, money, and ingenuity to Iowa, after spending the 2008 presidential primary season fruitlessly waving Ron Paul banners over Bay Area freeway overpasses and staffing tables in front of local stores.

In 2010, some of Paul’s supporters rallied behind John Dennis, a Republican who tried to unseat Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). Dennis lost, but his campaign raised about $2 million, earned national media attention, and helped the group develop its more strategic approach.

This summer, before the Ames, Iowa Straw Poll, Dennis and Jun Dam helped set up a local phone bank operation using voter data from the Iowa Secretary of State and special telemarketing software. In a typical weekend, between five and ten volunteers make calls to Iowa voters, according to Dam.

“One woman said she wasn’t sure about Ron Paul. Then I told her about his anti-war views,” said Pat Lamken. “She had just gone to a funeral of a boy who’d been killed in Afghanistan. She said, ‘If Ron Paul will end that war, I’ll vote for him.’”

Another member of the group, Dan Pickell, 52, a Pacifica sheet metal contractor, said Iowans have been surprisingly receptive to unexpected phone calls from the San Francisco Bay Area.

“People are a lot more open to the message now because, for one, things are a lot worse in the country as the economy goes,” Pickell said. “Before, people just said he was some kind of kook. But now I think people who are actually paying attention do grasp the message of sound money, and the liberty message, and a humble foreign policy, and following the constitution.”

Dam, a 36-year-old financial planner, said he was inspired by Paul when he heard him advocating for noninterventionist foreign policies during a 2007 debate with Rudy Giuliani.

“I was never politically active before that,” said Dam. “But ever since them I’ve been helping out, trying to spread the ideas of freedom and liberty.”

Members of the Sansome St. group pride themselves on their iconoclastic views. Lamken, a 60-year-old paralegal, said she is a registered Republican who is also involved with the anti-war group Code Pink.

“A lot of us are self-employed, or small business owners in one way or another. I don’t think we have any member of the group who works for the government,” Lamken said. “One person who worked with a defense contractor had to quit because it didn’t fit well with her job.”

While San Francisco may be a liberal bastion, the region is also fertile ground for Libertarian ideas, including those espoused by Paul, according to Dorien Zandbergen, an anthropologist at Leiden University in Amsterdam, who studies Bay Area culture.

The region’s mix of New Age, hippie, and tech-reverent ideas produces “first and foremost an anti-authoritarian stance — the notion that there’s no authority higher than yourself,” Zandbergen said in an e-mail.

In the days before the Jan. 3 Caucuses, at least three members of the Sansome St. group traveled to Iowa, to knock on doors and campaign for Paul.

On Wendesday, Dam was in Davenport chaperoning out-of-state volunteers.

“I’ve been renting them hotel rooms, getting people connected through phone banking, and getting them connected with people here in Iowa,” he said.

A man named Starchild, who described himself as an erotic services provider and refused to reveal his age, left San Francisco for Iowa Wednesday. A perennial Libertarian candidate for office in San Francisco, Starchild has long been a fixture of the Bay Area’s underground political scene. Like the other members of the Sansome Street group, Starchild says he sees a kindred spirit in Ron Paul.

“I really like his authenticity. He’s a humble guy who’s an ideologue. He’s genuinely passionate about the ideas,” Starchild said, “And he sees the potential of having a major impact, and changing the course of history, by running for president.”

Article source: http://www.baycitizen.org/politics/story/ron-paul-strategy-four-years-making/