Western Dem announces campaign for President
Former US Senator Mike Gravel, who represented Alaska from 1968 to 1980, will announce on Monday that he is running for President.
Gravel was a well-known figure in the 1970s, scrapping with the Nixon Administration - most notably over the Pentagon Papers and forcing the end of the draft. According to a profile of Gravel in The Nation, he's got that Western Dem style:
The Pentagon Papers battle was a classic Mike Gravel fight. A scrappy former speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, the senator had little patience with the secrecy and compromises of official Washington. An unrelenting critic of nuclear weapons testing on the Alaskan island of Amchitka, he came to the Capitol prepared to take on presidents and fellow senators, and he did so repeatedly. Gravel clashed not just with the Nixon administration but with fellow Democrats who counseled a more cautious approach to a president who, before Watergate, was perceived as being both popular and powerful. It was Gravel who in 1971, against the advice of Democratic leaders in the Senate, launched a one-man filibuster to end the peactime military draft, forcing the administration to cut a deal that allowed the draft to expire in 1973.
Read the rest of the profile. Doesn't appear to be a Gravel for President site up yet, though.
Kari Chisholm | April 16, 2006 | Comment on This Post (4 so far) |
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The only problem is, this guy is currently senile at best, and batshit nuts at worst. Check out the brand new interview at politics1.com
Posted by: WyoBlueDog | Apr 17, 2006 8:45:44 PM
See the charming article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/17/AR2006041701297.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
I like him already. Will he win? That doesn't matter.
Posted by: Leo Brown | Apr 19, 2006 4:12:23 PM
Mike Gravel and The National Initiative for Democracy
First of all I would like to say that I support the basic ideas behind the National Initiative for Democracy, and many of the other ideas that Senator Mike Gravel is championing I especially like the ideas of internet voting and national voter registration.
Having said that, I must say that running for President is probably an unnessessary step to getting national attention for these ideas. Senator Mike Gravel has only been a candidate for President for a few days, and already he is embroiled in a scandal because he attended a meeting in 2003 that included holocaust deniers. Internet voting and national voter registration are now on the back burner while he discusses Middle East politics and whether or not he is anti-semetic.
The approach that Senator Mike Gravel is taking to achieve the goals of his National Initiative for Democracy also seem strangely rigid and partisan. Are we really ready for a nationwide vote on a law that will cast in stone this new form of democracy? The internet is evolving very rapidly.
Rigid
Shouldn't we experiment with some prototypes to see how well this type of system will work, before we make it the law of the land? My personal view is that it does not need legal standing to be effective. When the prototype system has evolved into a well understood voting system that has worked over a period of years, most voters would then be more than willing to support making it the law of the land. The system Senator Mike Gravel and The National Initiative for Democracy are advocating reminds me of the California Ballot Initiative system, an old fashioned hard to use system that does not help voters understand what they are voting on. I personally have voted several times for initiatives using this system without really understanding what I was voting for.
Partisan
Some of the provisions of The National Initiative for Democracy sound like Vietnam era utopian pipe dreams. I think we should start with the premise that the present system works. We eventually reach the right answers with our present system of government, but the present process just takes too long. Making big changes to the system at the same time as we move to the internet seems risky. The section below of the Democracy Amendment would completely change our present system.
Section 6. Only natural persons who are citizens of the United States may contribute funds, services or property in support of or in opposition to a legislative initiative created under the authority of this Article. Contributions from corporations including, but not limited to, such incorporated entities as industry groups, labor unions, political parties, political action committees, organized religions and associations, are specifically prohibited. Such entities are also prohibited from coercing or inducing employees, clients, customers, members, or any other associated persons to support or oppose an initiative created under the authority of this Article.
Trying to understand the long term effects of such sweeping changes, would be difficult if not impossible. Why make so many changes? And why make the changes into Federal law?
Bob Carmichael
http://directvote.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Bob Carmichael | Apr 28, 2006 1:09:23 PM
Presidential site 2008 for Mike Gravel http://www.gravel2008.us/
Posted by: Deborah | Jul 19, 2006 6:47:18 PM
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(and yes, we know that sometimes they're very, very wrong. Other times, they're right on.)
