There was a rally for Nader this noontide in Washington Square Park. It was mostly the usual suspects there, both for the park (scruffy-looking poor and crazy people) and the protest (scruffy-looking college-educated people). I hope there was at least a little cross-pollination. Susan Sarandon spoke, and she was great but as usual the first thing that we all remembered is that we've seen her in her underwear.

There were about six of us who showed up to do our bit for Billionaires for Bush or Gore; bit of a small turnout, but we chanted loud enough to make up for it. There were a couple of old Commies who just didn't get it, and followed us around heckling us for supporting BushGore. One grizzled fellow looked genuinely smug, as if he expected Nader to win in a landslide. I wonder if he was as isolated from Nader-naysayers as I am. I try to keep perspective tho.

The Bills had gotten a late start finding each other; each of us had spent a quarter hour scrutinizing any well-dressed person in the park for signs of affiliation. It was genuinely hard to tell. I went running towards a table of suit-wearing men at the west entrance of a park until I got close enough to realize what I thought were signs were actually religious-looking tracts in Russian. Another time, a man in a tremendous, immaculate fake-fur coat, miniskirt, and tights passed, and we didn't stop staring at him until he was halfway across the park from us. He could have been a Billionaire, really.

Towards the end of the rally three middle-aged white guys in suits showed up right next to us. These ones were clearly the real deal. I like to give those types a pain, and so I made nice to them like we Billionaires were kindred spirits, to let the suits know we Greens didn't like assholes on our turf. Once I started talking to them I got confused. They were kind of sympathetic. I felt bad for a minute, because I had forgotten they might be legal observers, who often show up to these events sticking out like well-scrubbed thumbs-- I have a clear memory of the first one I saw, a very clean-looking guy at a DC anti-war rally who was, incongruously, sucking on a ring-pop-- but the more I talked the less I was able to pin these guys down. They were predicting that Nader would pull less than 1% of the vote (they hadn't heard about the 13% in Oregon, and when they did they insisted that was just the mountain vote) in a tone of voice that said though they thought this was a long shot, they admired Nader for trying and thought his candidacy brought something they'd missed. They wished us luck as they left. Maybe they were closet Libertarians?