In the past few days the “Bill Gates for President” message has reached Hundreds of Thousands of people, obviously more than we expected it to do in such a short time-span. Because of this tiger wave of attention we missed out on the organic growth stadium of our movement, something we can hopefully start catching up for right about now…

That’s right, we really are serious about this. To get our ideas out there we are looking for ten to fifteen adults who, even though we all know it’s a long shot to see Bill actually run for President, feel strongly about our ideas and are willing to contribute some time to the collective. Our small but enthusiastic team is proving to be a tiny bit too small, and with some extra (wo)manpower we’re sure we can do so much more…

Every four years pundits, radio talk show hosts and U.S. citizens beg for a presidential candidate who’s not a career politician. And every four years the two major parties nominate — you guessed it — career politicians! No true, non-political alternatives have the party backing, or, it seems, the ability to connect and gain our trust. I guess voters don’t mind career politicians after all.

Donald Trump is too full of himself (but Letterman would have great material), Ross Perot was too preachy and weird, and Arnold is too foreign (meaning he legally can’t run; not that I’m against Austrians).

Here’s a name that could overcome all these obstacles: Bill Gates. Not the old Bill Gates spouting technology, wearing ill-fitting clothes and crushing competitors for sport (though his company is doing this with relish and third parties are paying the price). No. I’m talking about the new Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Time for some polling! In the weeks to come we’ll be launching a series of polls in which we put a potential candidate for the 2008 election and Bill Gates in a head-to-head position. We realize we’re putting Bill up there without him even expressing any of his views on what his political choices would be, but the reason that’s not stopping us from starting these polls is simple: we believe in Bill’s rational choices and his ability to make the right decisions.

Senator John McCain of Arizona will be the first one to be tested against Gates. John McCain has emerged as the early front-runner for the Republican nomination. He stands for conservatism, or as he put it to the Washington Post, “My record is the same on all issues, which is that of a conservative Republican. Not a liberal Republican. Not a moderate Republican.” You can find more info on Senator McCain on the John McCain 2008, The Exploratory Committee website, Wikipedia or John McCain on the Issues.

We had quite a few e-mails during the weekend from people asking for bumper stickers, buttons and T-shirts to help us spread the word. We hesitated for a while but after e-mail number ten we decided to give it a go.

We’ve made a small CafePress.com store in which we’re currently selling some shirts, mugs, magnets and stickers. We’re not giving stuff away, but because we’re not in this for the money either (we have a long way to go to break-even ;-)), we’re donating at least 10% of all the profits to HIV/AIDS charities, even if we’re still in the red. We’ll up the percentage at the point of break-even!

We’ve also made some free pdf templates people can use to print out their own posters and flyers. Thanks to Jeff Taylor for the great idea!

The last few days have been a BMW-ride for us, and we’re spending quite some time reading and replying to e-mails from our visitors. We started working on a FAQ today and will hopefully be adding it to the website in the week to come.

One kind of e-mail deserves some special attention though. Loads of people send us e-mails about Microsoft products (most of the time people are referring to malfunctioning operating systems or browsers), with a closing paragraph saying: “that’s why it’s so obvious Bill Gates would make a shitty president. We call it the “Windows-Gates-Transfer (WGT)”-syndrome and it appears to be a serious problem amongst the members of certain anti-Microsoft subcultures. They’re all very passionate about their arguments (that’s a good thing, by the way), but I can’t say I really see their point. Here’s a very nice example of WGT: