Chapter 9
How The Rumpkins Got their Name
On a picture-perfect afternoon, leaving Sally and Patty lounging poolside at the Sheraton-Portland, we dropped Huck and Steve off by the Rose Garden tennis courts. Skip, Rocky, and Susie proceeded to the Forward Party’s suite in the old Coachman building near Powell’s Bookstore. Pushing the buzzer, nobody answered, but there was a sign in the foyer that gave a number to call. “Well yeah, we’re actually meeting tonight and you’re welcome to stop by,” we were told by the guy who answered the phone.
It was an eventful night. The Yang fans in Portland were just getting organized and the meeting tonight was with some Greens and “Indies” (their word for Independents) to see if a coalition could be formed under the banner of the Forward Party. Although just getting started, they had done some research and even had Eloise Johnson’s campaign for Boulder, Montana, School Board on their radar screen.
After the meeting, a few of the Portlanders reconvened at the Goose Hollow Inn, owned by a former Mayor of Portland, Bud Clark, and invited us to tag along. The night had turned stormy. Rain falling. Traffic lights reflecting in the puddles. It was a two-block walk and we arrived wet. At first it seemed like there was nothing special about Bud’s place – just a neighborhood tavern, a dozen stools and half-dozen tables on each side of a U-shaped bar, with popcorn and microwave pizza if hungry. But upon closer inspection, the framed photographs and news stories, up on the walls, told a different story. Bud was a colorful character, more than a politician, he was proud to be a tavern owner running for office riding his bike all over town, promoting the arts as his number one issue. The biggest photograph on the wall – showing him wearing only a raincoat and appearing to expose himself to a nude female statue – was titled “Expose Yourself to Art.”
After a round of beers, we ordered shots of tequila. Susie gave the Portland crowd an update on how Eloise’s campaign was going: “So, we’ve gotten to be best friends, and I’m super-excited she’s running for school board – but as a Yang Future Party candidate, we didn’t figure she had much of a chance . . . . that is, until Skip and his pranksters hit town. It was front page news that a bunch of old hippies had arrived from Minnesota to be her volunteers. And, of course, Boulder has a lot of red-necks, so it was like back to the ‘60s: red-necks versus hippies with the hippies getting run out of town at gunpoint . . .”
“Yeah, well, not quite,” Rocky interrupted, “no red-necks, they were all long hairs . . . .”
“and wearing MAGA caps,” Skip interjected, “. . . . but now they’re supporting Eloise!”
“It was great!” Susie said. “All voters, all potential voters, Libertarians, Indies, Bernies, and “Trumpet-ers” is what I would call them — need to join under one banner, trumpeting Freedom! Freedom to read what you want . . . freedom to be yourself! . . . and, oh yeah, we need electoral reform.”
Rocky interrupted again: “Won’t happen. Maybe we should just run a pig for President, you know, like the ‘68 Yippies did, totally anti-establishment . . .”
“Or better yet,” Susie said, pointing to that photo on the wall, “take a page out of Bud’s playbook: Run for President, all of us in raincoats!”
By midnight, a couple guys from a different table joined us. They had been at the meeting, but sought their own counsel at the Inn. A guy named Jesse said, “Yah, Yang’s okay, but check out the Pirate Party – think about ways to ‘hack’ the current system.” Jesse described himself as one of these really, really tech savvy computer geeks who can do just about anything on the internet, “. . . even things the Russians haven’t figured out how to do – or Congress hasn’t yet figured out should be illegal.”
Jesse’s buddy said he had something to say: “Think back to the founding of the country. Back before the Revolutionary War, folks in Colonial Virginia were also mighty upset with their government. What they started doing was meeting as a rump group at the local tavern . . .”
“Meeting as a . . . what?! A bunch of asses?!” Rocky said, interrupting.
“Let me finish,” this new guy said. “This tavern was across the street from the Virginia House of Burgesses. The guys hanging at the tavern started acting like they were the legitimate ones enacting laws, and those across the street, the insiders, were nobodies. But the backbenchers, the tail end of the insiders, started joining those drinking at the tavern . . .”
“Ohhh, I get it,” Rocky said. “They weren’t the assholes – they were the left-behinds.”
“Pretty soon,” according to this guy, “the drinking crowd had more followers and better ideas, and started debating and voting on the laws they’d like to see in place, and before too long these new ideas got so popular they actually became the laws of Virginia.”
Later on we learned this account of things in colonial Virginia was not entirely historically accurate, but by our first day in California, somebody had crayoned “Join The Rumpkins!” on our back window, and the name stuck.
One last thing about that night in Portland, Jesse had invited us to stay in touch because he had an idea on how the internet and social media, just like a tavern, could be used to do a 21st Century version of rump legislating (or organizing).