Considering again Mike Gravel
On Sunday, I listened to Mike Gravel being interviewed by — well, after This American Life ends at 11:00 am that godawful Car Duo comes on NPR, and a quick flick of the “am/fm” switch brings me to the local Air America affiliate, which has on… what’s it called? Politically Direct. With David Bender. David Bender. A weekend run-through of what is nationally a weekday hour long program.
A decent fellow, this Mike Gravel. He gave what would, for good or bad, amount to his answers to some of my “10 Questions for Mike Gravel”, which probably isn’t even the 10 Questions I would post today anyway.
My not-particularly heartfelt propaganda of with preposterously lound angry titles has afflicted me. I found myself grating my teeth when Mike Gravel reiterated that “nobody who voted for the Iraq War Resolution is qualified for the Presidency.” Firstly, he listed Chris Dodd as one of those “fundamentally good people” he feels “heartbroken” for saying such a thing against, never mind he did vote no. Secondly, his 1968 campaign against Ernest Gruening — one of two votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, was that of a professed hawk taking down a dove. George McGovern even helped organize the campus – centered anti-war movement in Alaska to carry on with a write-in campaign for Gruening. Had he been able to vote, Mike Gravel would have voted to escalate the Vietnam War on — probably up to when the Democratic Johnson made way for the Republican Nixon. All I know for sure is it wasn’t the Pentagon Papers which shook Mike Gravel into opposing the Vietnam War, since Daniel Ellsburg already fingered him as one of the politicians to shop them to.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander: anyone who all evidence points to as being a vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is unqualified for the Presidency, never mind what political changes they make thereafter. Or so should Mike Gravel’s logic work.
He has clearly heard the problems people have with his 22 percent national sales tax replacing the current income tax, as he expressly said “some liberals and progressives balk at it saying it’s a regressive tax”. And he went on to argure that it’s an improvement over the current model because the rich can’t just plow through the codes and write their own tax code. Again, this elicited in me a smirk: Just like Ross Perot, huh?
Mike Gravel’s argument on behalf of the National Initiative, his pet cause and reason for being, seems to hinge on the denial that corporate interests really have taken over at state level initiatives, and the belief that the populace have shown themselves better stewards of the tax dollars than pandering elected officials. The answer somehow just failed to connect with the question, and I’m left thinking that that something that may not be a bad idea is ultimately not the defintion of something that is a good idea.
When I tuned in, a few minutes into the program, I did not know who I was listening to and I couldn’t make him out. His soliloquays about repairing our educational system for better connectedness and civic engagement, his comments on how no president has dared mention the Military Industrial Complex since Eisenhower left and his general dispensation to the period of political history from the New Deal to Kennedy struck me as a somewhat more nostalgic version of this type of wise elder statesman of the Left like Howard Zinn and (a bit more aristocratically) Gore Vidal and Lewis Lapham. He clearly wasn’t any of them — nor was he Bill Moyers — his speech wasn’t as garbled. Tending to tie strands of history into a bit of a knot, standing on a higher plane than the electoral politics that gets bogged down in temporal and passing fits of pettiness. I don’t know if this is a compliment or not, but it is what it is.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see any reason for those entities that chart those somewhat inane Horse Race “Power rankings” of which presidential candidate is up, or down, or sideways to stick Gravel — speaker at that recent DNC winter meeting of some words that at least reverberated to a few points out there — lower than some other candidates who aren’t about to be elected either. Mike Gravel has to be higher than Joseph Biden or Tom Vilsack, right?
Coming soon: another preposterously angrily titled Mike Gravel entry, this one about his stances on the Environment. He was an Alaskan politician, what do you think he did on that one?
February 22nd, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Absolute garbage to say Gravel would have voted to extend Vietnam. Shame on you.
February 23rd, 2007 at 9:38 am
He ran as a Hawk in his 1968 primary election against Gruening. Good for him for changing his mind shortly there-after, I suppose, but it is what it is.