This coming Sunday afternoon, Ron Paul supporters, hot off their $4.3 million dollar “money bomb” fundraising effort in November, are holding a Boston Tea Party-themed rally at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.
The event is getting attention not only from Paul’s passionate online community, whose campaign videos touting the event (here, here, and here) portend a $12 million dollar plus quarter for Paul, but also from ABC news for the theatrics his supporters have in store:
Overhead during the tea party, an enormous, helium-filled blimp that supporters independently banded together, circumventing current election law, to buy and float to Boston from North Carolina will implore New Englanders to “Google Ron Paul.”
But how can they afford to do this, given FEC limits on PAC fund-raising? Paul supporters, unaffiliated with the campaign, have found an ingenious way of getting around federal election laws and are, perhaps, setting a precedent for future circuses. The ABC report continues:
Instead of forming a Political Action Committee that operates much like a campaign with fund-raising limits, the people behind the blimp, [are] incorporating an actual company, a limited liability corporation, instead of a PAC, through which to sell stakes in the blimp lease to supporters.
Given their unorthodox fund-raising tactics, viral video blitzes, and poll-jamming, it’s unsurprising that Paul’s backers have come up with even more circuitous ways of supporting their candidate and getting his message out. And although Paul is nowhere in Iowa—the latest polls have him topping out at 4.4 percent—his supporters are showing that backwards fund-raising legislation can, and should, be circumvented by entrepreneurial thinking.