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Opinion: Mike Gravel’s offensive

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With the most recent Times Poll showing Democrat Mike Gravel’s standing at 0% in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the former senator’s surge to the front of the political pack has yet to emerge.

Yes, he’s gotten some ink recently and even not so recently when The Times’ Tomas Alex Tizon followed him on his simple campaign trail.

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He’s still trekking around the countryside, alone, staying at friends’ houses and talking to anyone who will listen. He was in Colorado this week where he got some free publicity in a Denver Post article. And hoped he could convince maybe 70 people to show up at his niece’s house in Boulder and pay $50 apiece to hear him speak.

Gravel stands last in fundraising among Democrats, having gathered a little more than $200,000 through June this year. That’s less than former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore took in, and he’s long since seen the light and dropped out.

Gravel has so many ideas at odds with the political mainstream, which is swell in a democracy as long as you’re good with guaranteed political failure. You have to admire almost anyone who offers themselves up for elected office in the media meatgrinder that has become modern American politics. But you also sometimes wonder whether loners like Gravel and Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are worthy of applause for their stick-to-it-iveness or if they’re simply dim.

Gravel has written off Iowa. Good thing. He’s never registered anything there in the polls, which supporters will no doubt allege among themselves is a media conspiracy but really shows the difficulty in random sampling of finding anyone who will vote for the guy. For starters, he’s against ...

ethanol as a substitute fuel, which pretty much writes off much of the agricultural Midwest. He bemoans the power of big-money political contributions, which is what you’d expect from someone without any.

He’s pleased with his videos’ popularity on YouTube, which is free, and he delights in making rhetorical cannonballs into the pool at the Democratic debates, which are free. ‘I think the American people are fed up with what’s going on,’ he said astutely. The trick, of course, is translating that discontent into votes for someone who talks as bluntly as Gravel.

During this week’s online debate sponsored by Slate, Yahoo and Huffington Post that no one was allowed to hear or see for a day, Gravel went for the skinny, smart vote when he opined, ‘I’m prepared to tell you that Americans are getting fatter and dumber.’

In Denver he vowed to Chuck Plunkett, a reporter, ‘I can promise you I will be a very unique president of the United States.’ Besides the fact that the word ‘unique’ can’t be modified -- it’s like ‘pregnant,’ you are or you aren’t -- a unique President Gravel is not likely something we’re going to see come Jan. 20, 2009.

--Andrew Malcolm

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