Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel: Relative Unknown to Web Sensation
By Deniz Yeter
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 15 May 2007
A little less than two weeks ago, hardly anyone knew that Mike Gravel was running for president. Since the former Alaska senator announced his bid for the presidency last year in April, he has gone virtually unheard of.
Now, after his performance at the first Democratic debates, Senator Gravel has picked up great momentum online. USA Today noted that "Gravel" became the 15th most popular search on the Internet, and CBS news said, "on the Internet, Gravel is a sensation - a refreshing ace amid a sea of cookie-cutter candidates seen as typical politicians."
According to figures from the Internet traffic monitoring company Alexa, Mike Gravel's campaign web site - gravel2008.us - received a spike of 1,614 percent in traffic after the first debates. This jump gave Gravel twice as many visitors after the debates as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani.
Gravel's campaign web site received so much traffic in the weeks preceding the debates that it was temporarily shut down. "Bless our web team, they haven't slept in a week," Gravel's Press Secretary Alexander Colvin said in a press release.
Clips of his performance in the first Democratic debates in South Carolina are spreading throughout the blogosphere. While his fellow contenders played it safe, Gravel went on the offensive to drop lines such as "this war was lost the day that George Bush invaded Iraq on a fraudulent basis.
"And I got to tell you, after standing up with them, some of these people frighten me - they frighten me," Gravel went on to say, referring to the other candidates at the debate. "When you have mainline candidates who turn around and say that there's nothing off the table with respect to Iran, that's code for using nukes ... nuclear devices.
"Who is the greatest violator of the nonproliferation treaty? The United States of America. We signed a pledge that we would begin to disarm, and we're not doing it. We're expanding our nukes.
"Who the hell are we going to nuke? Tell me, Barack. Barack, who do you want to nuke?" To which Senator Obama responded, "I'm not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike, I promise."
Attacking fellow candidates or party members can sink a campaign in most regards, but going after Hillary, Obama and others has propelled Gravel's status among voters to new heights.
"Gravel is championing the people and honestly battling to change the glaring flaws in the system - flaws that top-tier Democrats would rather gloss over because it advantages them," said Josh Bohnert, a 22-year-old Libertarian from Shawnee, Kansas. "They have been indoctrinated into the system and are unwilling to break free of its comfort to effect real progress."
This attitude reflects a growing demographic of American voters from every political party and alignment. They're fed up with politics as usual from the talking heads in Washington, and are ready to transcend party lines to elect [a candidate] they see as a genuine statesman who's "not owned by special interest groups like many of his fellow Democrats he shared the stage with," as Josh put it.
In an interview with Truthout, Gravel stated, "My first act in office would be to end the war in Iraq. The first foreign policy move I would make would be to try to bring peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Then I would have a very aggressive foreign policy."
He added, "While in office, one thing I would do is recommend that the government of Iraq draft around 3 million of [the country's] young people who are currently unemployed and are a source for militias and insurgents. We can make use of these young people by equipping them with the tools, instead of with weapons, necessary to rebuild their country.
"At the same time, get rid of American profiteering companies over there. That would set a new tone and help bring the civil war to a halt.
"It would show the Iraqis that we're not there to undermine them or take their oil, but the key is to get these kids off the streets because they're unemployed and are really feeding the insurgency."
When asked why statements made on Iran by his fellow presidential contenders frightened him, Gravel said, "Their statements implied - and more than implied because they knew exactly what they were saying - is that we would be willing to use nuclear devices against Iran if we felt it was in our interest. That's code for a pre-emptive war."
Gravel commented on his political career as a senator, when he made great strides in the nuclear proliferation movement, led a one-man filibuster against President Nixon to successfully end the Vietnam draft, and published the Pentagon Papers that exposed the countless lies behind the Vietnam War.
"In the Senate I immediately got involved with the nuclear testing that was going on in Alaska and was not satisfied with the various briefings I was receiving from the Atomic Energy Commission. I ended up opposing it and began fighting the testing that was going on, essentially setting up a global effort to thwart nuclear testing.
"That led to an expertise I developed on nuclear matters, and then I opposed the use of nuclear generation for electricity, which at the time suggested some very serious risks [were] involved."
Gravel went on to state that if he were president, he would disarm half of the US's nukes as an example to other nuclear states to size down their arsenal - nations such as Pakistan, India and Israel. Gravel said that one US Trident submarine had enough nuclear payload to hold the entire world hostage, so it will actually improve our security if we start to disarm and encourage other countries to follow in step.
Facing the threat of global climate change, Gravel said that he would work to lower America's carbon footprint by pushing "very hard to get to the European level of CAFE standards, which means we need to get to about 40 miles to the gallon. There's no reason why we couldn't do that, but Detroit is very reluctant to act on this. That's why Detroit has fallen behind the automobile industry for a long time, and the reason why Toyota has been moving ahead of General Motors.
"We can provide a great deal of incentive to have all forms of alternative energy that do not pollute the environment, such as wind energy, solar energy and nuclear fusion, which requires a lot more research. The Chinese and Japanese are already ahead of us on that.
"Another thing is that we need to redo our entire transportation system - to electrify it. That in itself will reduce an unbelievable amount of environmental degradation." Gravel also noted that climate change is a global problem, requiring the participation of other "global polluters" if we were to make any progress on the matter.
Talking on immigration, Gravel stated, "America must begin to address the root causes of our problems, and illegal immigration is a perfect example. Any discussion of illegal Mexican immigration must include NAFTA and the concept of "free trade." The North American Free Trade Agreement has been a disaster for the working class of the United States and of Mexico."
He pointed out, "Since NAFTA went into effect, one and a half million Mexican farm workers have been put out of work. Certain lands that were constitutionally guaranteed to remain the property of indigenous Indians were stripped from them. This is what has led to the wave of illegal immigration that we are now experiencing. Building walls and militarizing the border is not a solution.
"We must revisit our trade agreements and make structural changes to them in order to restore lost American jobs and to effectively deal with the immigration issue. I favor a guest worker program and setting up naturalization procedures that would fairly bring existing illegal immigrants into legal status."
Gravel also talked about a real need to fix Social Security, noting that part of the problem was "that Congress raids the Social Security fund every year to appeal to voters. This needs to stop; they're robbing our grandchildren's future." He went on to say that we needed to ensure that future generations would be able to reap the benefit of a program that they had been paying into for years.
He also delved into his National Initiative for Democracy legislation, which took him over 10 years to figure out. The bill aims to provide the people with the necessary procedures to "enact national initiatives as the law of the land and would permit people to become lawmakers. People can go to the website - ni4d.us - and they can vote for it."
Gravel explained, "When you look at the way things are going there are only two possible venues for change. One is the government, and of course that's what the problem is and they're unable to change. The other is the people, and the people can bring about a change if we can put a law in place that permits them to have the procedures to do it.
"The central power of government is lawmaking. If the people are ever to get a handle on their government, which they never have, they will have to become lawmakers. As a result of that, we will see unbelievable creativity, the creativity of the people to at least address problems politically, scientifically and economically."
Deniz Yeter is a regular contributor to Truthout.
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