Updated
“I’m the first candidate in American history to launch a campaign for second place,” says Chicken John Rinaldi, a well-known San Francisco artist and mechanic who is contesting favored incumbent Gavin Newsome’s bid to be the next mayor of the city (see photo: Newsome on the left, Rinaldi on the right).
If it weren’t for the timely intervention of Paypal itself, however, he wouldn’t still be in the running.
His campaign, launched on a whim this summer, raised $40,000 in twenty days, he tells us — an amount that should earn him matching funds from the city.
The problem was, the city requires candidates to provide it with the physical addresses of their donors. Chicken John received donations through Paypal, which does not normally provide payment recipients with personal information such as addresses of people making payments through the service (Paypal’s policy here).
Fortunately for Rinaldi, Paypal went out of its way to provide the city’s Ethics Commission with this information, the company tells us.
Rinaldi is currently waiting for final approval from the city, along with the matching funds owed him.
He is perhaps best known in the tech world for building a pickup truck that runs completely on coffee grounds, that has recently been on display at local cleantech conferences, Foo Camp, Burning Man and other geek-frequented events.
His campaign platform, like his truck (pictured), is a fusion of art and technology. He’d like to get at least one city bus also running on coffee grounds. He’d like to see low-income neighborhoods such as Bayview and Hunter’s Point get better internet access to aid in education; he’d like to see more used computers redistributed to poor people in the city. He’d like to see the city bureaucracy become more streamlined — online permits and such, with artists and inventors getting more leeway to build fuel-efficient cars, large works of art, and all manner of daring machines.
The former punk circus owner would like to San Francisco become “a world-class city of art, which it’s most definitely not right now.” You can read more on Chicken John’s platform here.
San Francisco tech folks are also lending Rinaldi a big hand.
Scott Beale, the owner of web hosting company Laughing Squid, blogger, geek photographer (he took the truck picture, above) and a long-time friend, set Rinaldi up with his own Wordpress-powered blog and is working with him on his web campaign strategy. Beale and other volunteers also worked on Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez’s campaign against Newsome in 2003, which came close to victory.
Lane Hartwell, a talented photojournalist at Wired (the picture at the top and the one below are both hers), has been documenting Rinaldi’s campaign on her blog and on Flickr.
The San Francisco mayoral election is on November 7th.
3 Comments
-
Bill W said:
Best of Luck to Chicken John - and a word of caution. I’m from MN, several years ago we had a gubernatorial candidate who didn’t expect to win the election, and became front page news around the world, Jesse “The Body” Ventura.
Chicken John - I hope you exceed all expectations!
Also - since we have ventured into the political realm, a friend of mine is running for President - Steve Kissing, Put a Square in the Oval Office:
http://www.kissing4prez.org/ -
Muggie Sommers said:
Oh, please. Why do poeple support this bullshit artist? It’s amazing, this guys ability to whip the hype machine into action.
This Mission District propertyowner and landlord was described by the Guardian as “representative of the street artists and economically marginal”. This man who has never produced any artistic output of his own is regularly described as an “artist”. This man who had to have other people handle every single tech aspect of his life (he couldn’t even get his own email address right in some of his early campaign materials) is now being described as a hero of “tech counterculture”?
Have you all lost your minds?
It’s hard to swing a dead cat in SF’s arts scene without hitting three people who don’t like Chicken John. He’s an ass, an egomaniac and an attention-seeker. He tried to take over Burning Man a few years ago, too, with his “Borg2″ scheme (with himself at the head, of course.)
It’s a testament to how shallow this town his that anybody pays any attention to him at all. Any city with a lick of sense would have run him out on a rail. But here, he talks about “art” and everyone genuflects, as if hollow promises from a man who openly admits he has no plan to accomplish anything will get something done somehow.
And now he’s whining that he didn’t get to abuse the public matching funds program, which was meant to ensure candidates can win an election without bowing to moneyed interests, and receive 50 GRAND in taxpayer money for a “campaign” he’s not even interested in winning!
This is like that episode of the old “Batman” TV show where the Penguin decided he wanted to run for mayor, and everybody in Gotham City forgot he was a villain and supported him!
DO NOT SUPPORT THIS GUY. HE’S ONE OF THE BAD GUYS. OPEN YOUR EYES.
-
Muggie Sommers said:
By the way, we issued a challenge to Chicken John to do things the way people who really make a difference do things — by getting involved, starting an arts foundation, etc., instead of running a pointless, self-aggrandizing joke campaign for office. (You can see the challenge on http://www.dontvoteforchicken.com/challengetochickenjohn.html)
He didn’t bother to respond.
2 Trackbacks
8:25 pm
Budget Web Hosts » Chicken John, tech counterculture’s candidate for SF mayor said:
[...] Emily’s World wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt“I’m the first candidate in American history to launch a campaign for second place,” says Chicken John Rinaldi, a well-known San Francisco artist and mechanic who is contesting favored incumbent Gavin Newsome’s … [...]
9:34 am
VentureBeat on Chicken John & His Run For Mayor | Laughing Squid said:
[...] Eldon has great write-up about Chicken John and his run for Mayor of San Francisco on the venture capital blog VentureBeat, calling him “tech counterculture’s candidate for [...]