Yep, it was indeed.

Yesterday I posted a story about Obama and Gravel and the National Initiative. It was an April Fool's Day post - the story was written by a number of the Thirty-Five Percenters and designed for several purposes. One of them worked - I got literally twice as much traffic yesterday as the the next highest in the past week, and a third again as the next in the past month (and that was the Nonbelieving Literati post for the latest book). Okay, it's hardly in the stratospheric level, but clearly this post brought a lot more readers than usual.

Did the other aims succeed? I don't know. One of them was to bring more visibility to the Mike Gravel campaign - they were supposed to post a video on their YouTube channel to tie into the post, but for reasons that remain vague to me they didn't. Another was to highlight the problems of third-party candidates. To what extent that happened, here or on the other fine blogs that participated, only time will tell.

Another was to get people to look at the National Initiative. And here I'll let someone who commented yesterday have his say (I deleted the comment yesterday because it was early, we were expecting the Gravel video still, and I didn't want to pop the balloon too soon). So, take it away, Evan:

Evan Ravitz has left a new comment on your post "Obama's getting behind the National Iniative!":

April Fools! I just talked to Mike Gravel (I worked for him on the National Initiative in 2002, and participated in the Democracy Symposium which finalized the Initiative language in 2001) and he confirmed it's a hoax. "If only!" his wife said.

For REAL info and news and what YOU can do to bring REAL "government by the people" to America, see http://Vote.org It's recently been voted the #3 idea for the next President's agenda, so Obama might yet really back it!

Anyway, if you read the story here and tried to find the source, you were eventually (if you didn't quit) brought back to here, circling through a set of blogs whose owners cooperated in a ring. If you didn't do that yesterday, you might want to today - they're good blogs, all of them. (Or you can just check them out from here:

Blue Man in a Red District
BuelahMan’s Redstate Revolt
Cause for Concern
Freida Bee
Mock, Paper, Scissors
Monkey Muck
PoliTits
The Largest Minority
The Osterley Times
Truth, Justice & Peace

If you're interested, here's Davis Fleetwood's video about the incident - and third party campaigns in general.

Thanks for your patience, and if you don't do anything else - think about the electoral system in this country.