Greg Larkins stood in the driveway of his Antelope-area home Monday wearing an Obama-Biden pin on his white dress shirt.
Craig MacGlashan, head of the Sacramento County Republican Party, stood next to him in a gray pinstripe suit and sporting a McCain-Palin ball cap.
Both men were responding to the latest rash of political vandalism in the region and had the same message: Enough is enough.
For Larkins, the head of Sacramento County's Democratic Party, the problem hit home over the weekend, when he returned to find his Obama sign missing from his front yard and a message scrawled in black spray paint on his garage. "Obama's ship of fools," it read.
The act of vandalism sparked a $1,000 reward, a news conference that drew Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo (even though Larkins lives in the county) and a stern denunciation from the county GOP chief.
"This is not tolerable," MacGlashan said. "This is not free speech. This is a crime."
It is also a bipartisan problem.
Across town in Carmichael, Jaye Munger found that out Thursday night when a young blond woman in a van pulled up to her yard and pulled up her two McCain-Palin signs as passers-by stuck in rush-hour traffic watched in amazement.
"I was right there," said Brent Scott, a 42-year-old financial adviser who was stuck in traffic on Fair Oaks Boulevard near Arden Way.
As she yanked the signs out of the yard, Scott started yelling.
"I said, 'That's stealing, put those back. I'm going to memorize your license plate.' I just hate people stealing stuff, it doesn't matter if they're stealing Obama signs or McCain signs."
Munger didn't know what had happened until people like Scott started leaving their business cards with a description of the woman and her license plate number.
She responded by erecting two large signs of her own, one that read "Who took our McCain-Palin signs?" and another that announced, "You took our McCain-Palin signs – Not our votes."
Like Larkins, Munger was not amused by the theft, which she sees as violating her basic rights.
Talking about the matter Saturday in her kitchen, she came to tears thinking about the fact that her father died in World War II defending freedom and that her first husband died serving in the Air Force.
"People pay dearly to put those signs in their yards," said Munger, a 66-year-old former real estate broker. "I guess she's just young and didn't know what she was doing."
A few miles away, Kris Boshell was having similar thoughts. The 43-year-old Obama supporter had her sign knocked over Friday night. Whoever did it left a one-page screed denouncing her party as "demorats" and comparing it to the Communist Party.
"It just feels like someone's infringing on my freedoms," Boshell said. "I would never think about taking a sign out of someone's yard. That's what our freedom's about."
Such acts of vandalism and theft come around every election season, and some are stranger than others. In Del Norte County over the weekend, someone stuffed a bloody deerskin through the mail slot of the Democratic Party offices in Crescent City.
Nothing like that has surfaced in the Sacramento region, and officials say there is no way to quantify whether there are more stolen or vandalized signs this time around.
But Sacramento County elections spokesman Brad Buyse said his office has gotten calls about such acts, and that as Election Day approaches there probably will be more.
"It is frustrating, especially if the citizens end up paying for those signs themselves. They're not cheap. Some of the signs I've noticed are $11 or $14 apiece.
"That's frustrating, plus it's someone else suppressing your political views. You know that's not right."
It's also a crime, notes sheriff's Sgt. R.L. Davis, who said a perpetrator could face misdemeanor trespassing or theft charges. Extreme cases that involve breaking into a home or garage to steal a sign could be a felony.
That wasn't the situation in Munger's case, which ended with a bit of a twist. The license plate number the passers-by gave her wasn't registered to a van fitting the description of the vehicle they saw, a check by The Bee found.
The local Republican Party promised to deliver a huge McCain-Palin sign to her this week that will be set in place using heavy posts.
But she already has two new McCain-Palin signs that mysteriously appeared in her yard overnight in exactly the same place the other ones had been yanked from.
Munger thinks the thief from last week got to feeling guilty and tried to make amends.
"There was no note or anything, that's why I think it was her," she said.
Call The Bee's Sam Stanton, (916) 321-1091.
