Parade etiquette

I went to a parade. Took my kids to the North St Paul Fall Roundup Parade - which was this past Saturday, September 20th.

It was fine. It's been several years since I've been to a parade. I don't remember there being so much candy. The program showed exactly 100 participants in the parade: marching bands, policitians, local businesses, etc. It seems like every one of them had people handing out, or throwing out, candy to the kids watching. My kids each ended up with a large bag of candy. More candy than they got at Halloween last year. Seriously. Who knew?

There were many politicians in the parade. People running for County Commissioner, City Council, Congress. Betty McCollum was there. Ed Matthews, who is the Republican running against Betty, came by. He had someone dressed in a reindeer suit with a sign that said something like "Ed Matthews thinks we should drill in ANWR and so do I!". Nice -- recruit the reindeer to solicit drilling in ANWR. Whatever. Better yet, Ed had a whole bunch of people doing some chant about how "Betty won't drill" so she's "got to go", or something like that. Classy. When he came up to shake my hand, I just said "Way to go negative in a parade, dude, I've never seen that before."