Publicity Problems

It was 8:55AM and I was just about ready to walk from Schaanwald to Vaduz.  There was no media:  No television, no radio, no newspapers, nobody from the media.  There weren’t any people except for a young man named Rolf.  He was wearing a green military jacket, a green military t-shirt, and faded and shredded blue jeans.  He had a bone to pick with me.  He was wondering why I was doing this walk-a-thon for Affordable Entertainment Awareness and not for allowing the good people of Liechtenstein tovote for the leader of the free world.

I explained to Rolf that my original intent was for what he wanted when I planned this trip.  However, a lady named Claudia from nearby Planken (in Liechtenstein, all the cities are nearby.  It is the Delaware of Europe.) had been following my blog for a while and she seemed irate about the cost of entertainment.  She did not seem overly concerned about being unable to vote for the leader of the free world.  So I decided to go with the Affordability Awareness campaign.

Rolf and I headed off to Vaduz.  He had handwritten a sign in German for me to carry.  The sign he had me carry said,

“Nur eine dumme Person Kampagne in Liechtenstein, um Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten.” 

He told me that it said, “It takes a special person to campaign in a country he doesn’t live in.”  I found out later it meant something different.

Rolf was filming the walk-a-thon on his camcorder while I was holding the sign.  He got plenty of closeups of just me and the sign.  People were honking their horns as they drove by.  It seemed like Claudia was wrong and Liechtensteiners wanted to vote for the leader of the free world. 

At about 2:00, I arrived in downtown Vaduz.  When the people in the streets of Vaduz saw the sign I was carrying, they started laughing.  I was puzzled that people in the rest of the country seemed to applaud my effort while they laughed at me here.

A supporter who spoke both German and English told me that the sign actually meant, “Only an idiot would campaign in Liechtenstein for the President of the United States.”  At first I was mad at Rolf, but I soon realized he was just misguided.  While it is true I am running for the President of the United States, I feel it is important that people in the free world should be able to vote for the leader of the free world.   It just happens that the leader of the free world is always American.

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