You may remember that I said last month that I was going to run for president.

Well, I've been thinking about this since then, and you may notice that the link to the guestbook isn't on my main page anymore, and hasn't been for a while.

There's a pretty good reason for that, I'm probably not going to run for president.

I mean, I've been thinking about it, like I said, and well... to be honest, I don't know if I'd be very good at it, and I don't really like the thought that either I'll have to be a happy little idiot *coffcoffdubyacoff* or else all sorts of brilliant and despised.

I mean, I suppose I might end up being mediocre... but that's not any better, really.

You know, reading the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, particularly the Night Watch subseries, one gains a peculiar appreciation for politics.

Of course I'm speaking of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork (biggest city on the Disc), a cross between mayor and king, one Havelock Vetinari by name.

Yeah, so the name's kinda odd to us Americans (I'm making a guess that most of my readers are American, because that's what NedStat tells me), but he's certainly got a brilliant political mind.

Whatever it is you're running, be it city, state, country, or all of the above wrapped into one, you have to realize that it is in fact a machine, and if the machine breaks down, it's gonna take you with it.

It's also easiest to blame the most visible part of the government that screwed up.

If I went and screwed up the country by being mediocre or an idiot, I'd be the one blamed. And even if I was brilliant and made the country a better place, I'd still get blamed for forcing change on those who don't want it.

(Nevermind that change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.)

So I've decided to go behind the scenes. In my Government class tonight, we discussed the idea of multi-party systems, how much better they work than the two-party system we have, and how the two-party system is set up to knock down any third party.

And there I sat in class, mostly paying attention, but letting the weird bits in the back of my mind stew on the issue.

Yeah, I know that I'm a crazy liberal and all that, and I know politics and religion are the two subjects you shouldn't discuss with people you don't really know, and I know that I don't know everybody who reads this, especially since I'm putting up banners and people are likely to read this I've never interacted with in any way before.

But...

The Social Democrats seem to have a rather powerful following in Europe. Lots of people seem to like them, quite a bit.

They also seem to have rather more sense than the Republicans and even the Democrats I've been hearing of lately.

However, the combination of the thought that "socialism is just one step away from communism, and we all know Commies are BAD!" and the two-party system setup are going to make it fairly hard for the Social Democrats to have much, if any, power over here in the US.

So...

It's kind of like when you're cooking a pot roast or a steak or something. You have two options: Either you use high heat, in which case you burn the outside and the inside is still raw, but hey, it got that way pretty quickly, didn't it? Or, you use slow heat over a long period of time, and you end up with something that's all sorts of yummy.

To end this metaphor, what I'm saying is that you could give the SDP a lot of media coverage, and that would give them more and more media coverage, but it probably wouldn't be all that good, and you wouldn't get anywhere. In fact, it's possible you'd hurt yourself that way.

Or... you could go slow. Start small. Tell your friends. Contact the SDP overseas (yeah, so I haven't gotten that far... yet). Slowly build up a campaign and "forget" to do the media campaign stuff, because people will get pissed off at you if you tell them too soon.

Let the people know what Socialism really means, that it isn't just communism with a different name, that it will actually help people like poor broke college students, or the working class citizens, or the middle classes.

After all, Bill Gates was nice enough to give us nifty computers, but he doesn't need to sit on a pile of money. Neither do the other multi-billionaires; they're not doing anything with it, and that's part of the reason that the economy sucks ass right now.

Explanation of that: Giving money to people who already have money doesn't help, because they aren't going to spend it, they're going to invest.

So the company they invested in now has all this money that they are now supposed to invest, in making new factories or whatever... but...

Why would they make new factories, and make more of their product, if nobody's going to be able to afford to buy it?

This is what happened during the Great Depression; all the rich people had all the money, all the poor people had the dirt they lived in and on and not much else.

And then FDR took a large amount of money away from the rich people and through various programs gave it to the poor people and dragged us out of the Great Depression just in time for us to be dragged into World War II, but that wasn't really his fault.

Meanwhile, Dubya has plans on a bigass tax cut, wherein somewhere between 41-60% would go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

See problems much?

End explanation.

Anyway, I've never really honestly attempted revolution before, peaceful or otherwise; and I suppose it wouldn't really be revolution, since I'm not trying to get rid of the government, just to change it.

For one thing, a multi-party system would be nice.

So... I'm going to see if I can't make plans for a Social Democratic Party to actually make some headway here in the USA. And part of that will include not talking about it with the media. ;) (Partly because, as I said, it'll burn it out and people will be mad at me, but also perhaps because I don't know the answers to all the questions they might ask.)

There's going to be a few more entries tonight. Stay tuned.