Mike Gravel has announced that he will announce his candidacy for the presidency on Monday.
If you’re like me, you’re asking two questions:
1. How weird is announcing an announcement?
and
2. Who’s Mike Gravel?
Okay, well, Question 2 sort of answers Question 1, I guess. When no one knows who you are, you’ve got to generate some buzz. As for the answer to Question 2, Mike Gravel was a Democratic Senator from Alaska from 1969 to 1980 (here’s some crap he did), and now promotes the National Initiative for Democracy, which seeks to empower people to become lawmakers—a concept with which I’m not sure I agree, considering that the majority of this country voted twice for George Bush.*
Anyhow, he’s now just shy of his 76th birthday, and now lives in Arlington, Virginia. He seems like a feisty old dude and might be interesting (or something) to have in the race, if his candidacy actually goes anywhere.
One rather disturbing thing, though, is that Gravel apparently appeared as a speaker at the June 2003 conference of a Holocaust-deniers' publication. Every report on this I found leads back to the same source, which certainly implies that he was not there in any capacity other than as a Holocaust denier himself. I’d be interested to hear if anyone knows any more details about this.
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* Obviously that's not true, but you get my drift.
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