Ever since last Thursday’s primaries in Iowa, the media has been abuzz with analysis of what the results mean for the leading candidates. Has Barack Obama stamped his ticket to the White House? Will Hillary Clinton be able to recover from her devastating third-place finish?
But all this coverage has unfairly focused on the candidates who actually got votes. As such, the media has completely overlooked Mike Gravel— a 78-year-old former Democratic senator from Alaska who failed to get a single caucus vote in Iowa.
Gravel is an odd man, and an even stranger candidate. If you haven’t seen his campaign videos on You- Tube, I recommend you look them up. They’re quite possibly the best piece of surrealist political theatre you will ever see. In one, Gravel raps to “Give Peace a Chance” while pseudo- Schoolhouse Rock animation plays in the background.
My favourite features Gravel, looking like someone’s sweet ol’ grandpa, standing on an Alaskan beach staring into the camera with doelike eyes, expressionless and silent, for about a minute and a half. Then he picks up a rock and heaves it into the lake, turns around and wanders into the distance for another minute and a half. Hilarious.
Gravel has vowed to continue his campaign right up until November 3, the night of the presidential election. He’s not going to drop out of the race, he says, even though his own party has barred him from participating in any further debates. The Democrats are trying desperately to get back into the White House after being shut out for nearly a decade. They don’t have time to fool around.
Here’s the thing: Gravel’s no joke (at least not entirely). He’s got more senatorial legislation under his belt than any other candidate and is responsible for major events in American history. In 1971, he entered the infamous Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record despite extreme pressure from Richard Nixon’s Justice Department to keep them quiet. Gravel read the 4,000 page report to the press until he virtually collapsed in tears from exhaustion. These documents revealed the true nature of the Vietnam War to many Americans, and their publication was key to ending the conflict.
Gravel subsequently faced charges from the FBI for revealing state secrets, but defended his publication of the papers as “essential to [Americans’] democratic decision-making.”
Thirty-seven years later, Gravel is still campaigning in the name of “democratic decision-making.” His main goal is to change the constitution to allow voters to actually write and pass legislation, rather than voting others into office to do it for them. He basically wants to bypass the current U.S. governmental system, because he thinks it’s corrupt.
Gravel says American “representative government is broken.” He’s bashed all the presidential front-runners as being “politics as usual” and for selling out everyday citizens for big-business interests.
He has a point. For all the candidates’ talk of “change” and the positive optics of finally having nonwhite, non-male contenders, are any of them really capable of overturning America’s bankrupt political system of big money, lobbyists, and corporate interest?
Obama, widely seen as the candidate most dedicated to change, now the clear front-runner, may well be a trustworthy, well-intentioned politician, but he’s not immune to corporate influence. In his time as Illinois senator, he’s helped funnel taxpayer money to Exelon Corporation, the world’s biggest nuclear power plant operator and a key Obama funder. He also voted down legislation that would limit credit-card interest rates for debt-ridden citizens—financial firms were his second biggest campaign contributors. He has deep ties to multinational agribusinesses operating in his home state.
No matter what good Obama might do for the American people, he’ll always have to balance their needs with the needs of the people and corporations who put him in the position to run for president. That’s just the way the system works.
Gravel isn’t going to get much attention as he wanders his lonely campaign trail in the coming months, but his presence on the fringes of 2008’s “landmark campaign” should serve as a reminder—albeit a somewhat comical one—that America’s a long way away from a democracy that responds to the needs of its citizens instead of the demands of its lobbyists.
