. . . . I dunno when it was, maybe 2000 but certainly by 2004, I jokingly told some friends in an email group that I was going to run for president. I generated an AOL home page for my "campaign" and listed the planks in my platform.

It was, of course, meant as a joke, and yet there was something of a serious side to it, too. After all, what was to prevent someone, someone like me, from launching an Internet-based campaign for high public office? With no funds raised, no funds spent, with only word-of-cyber-mouth for a campaign, why not? Why not at least get some public notoriety for a truly progressive agenda?

Most of us in the group were -- and are -- of an age to remember the campaigns of comedian Pat Paulsen. We are also of an age to remember the idealism of the 60s and to wonder what happened to it. Of course, because we're all also women, most of us fell into the socially-constructed roles of wife and mother and helpmeet and employee and maid-of-all-work and chauffeur, and we watched as our companions in life fell into the socially-constructed roles of breadwinner and ass-kisser-because-the-bills-have-to-be-paid and leaky roof mender and clunker-car-fixer. We watched as the 60s faded into the 70s and morphed into the horrors of the 80s and the renewed hope of the 90s and the catastrophe of the 00s. And now the 60s have returned, but in the form of our ages, not the calendar, and we feel not only a sense of responsibility but a sense of desperation and even a sense of regret.

So I made up my little "Tansy Gold for President" page and we laughed and we knew it was a pipe dream because no one would pay attention, no one at all outside our tiny little group and even if anyone else did pay attention it would only be to laugh -- and then to forget.

At the same time, as campaign gave way to campaign, and our side continued to lose and wimp out and act like spineless maroons, we knew our personal ideals were more in synch with Dennis Kucinich and yet we had more personal resonance with John Edwards, but as women we felt a down to the bone sisterhood with Hillary, even though we all really knew that Obama would probably get the nomination. And we knew we'd vote for him willingly and eagerly, because not to do so was to vote for our own annihilation. And we feared a protracted primary and an intra-party battle that separate those of us who needed each other most, but we'd do our own personal damnedest to see that didn't turn us from the only path to survival.

In the end we tucked the "Tansy Gold for President" campaign all away because it was only a joke, and who needs jokes when there's a world to save from the destructive forces of the vast and evil right wing conspiracy, from war and starvation and global warming and global poverty. And no one ever talked about Kevin Kline and "Dave," or Robin Williams and "Man of the Year." We let Stephen Colbert be the silliness for 2008, not Tansy Gold.

And now, as I watch the economy crumble and I worry about what's really happening in Iraq that "they" aren't telling us about (see Tom Engelhardt at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042108K.... ), as I see my own fragile security eroded bit by bit each day, as I listen to my children voice their fears for themselves and their young children, then I start to wonder if maybe we on the left, we who are the radicals, we who are the children and then the grandchildren of those idealistic 60s, we who are not ashamed to call ourselves socialists, maybe we ought to have a candidate who speaks for us in a voice that will be heard if only because it is so "out there," so "radical," so "silly."



It took me half an hour to find it, because all the places I thought I'd saved it, well, they weren't the right places. My AOL campaign page is still there, not, of course, under the name Tansy Gold, although I have an AOL account in that name. No, it's under my real name which a few of you may know.

I'm not sure when I put it up, except that it had to be sometime before May 2003. It was probably before March 2003, too, because there's no direct mention of Iraq and the war the boooosh/cheeeeneys exploded upon it.

Other than that, it's pretty much the same platform I'd run on today.

If I were running.

And I were really



Tansy Gold