You may have noticed there’s not much written here about Mike Gravel. That is, in part, because the Democratic presidential candidate has not had much new to say since he began his campaign (only one blog post in two months, for example). But it’s also because Gravel left such a sour taste in my mouth with his comments in the September 2007 presidential debate:

TIM RUSSERT: I want to ask Senator Gravel. You talk about running for president of the United States. In 1980 your condo business went bankrupt.

MIKE GRAVEL: Correct.

RUSSERT: In 2004 you filed for personal bankruptcy –

GRAVEL: Correct.

RUSSERT: — leaving $85,000 in credit bills unpaid. How can someone who did not take care of his business, could not manage his own personal finances, say that he’s capable of managing the country?

GRAVEL: Well, first off, if you want to make a judgment of who can be the greediest people in the world when they get to public office, you could just look up at the people up here. Money — many of them done very, very well in public office. I left the Senate no better than when I went in.

Now, you say the condo business. I’ll tell you, Donald Trump has been bankrupt a hundred times. So I went bankrupt once in business.

And the other — who did I bankrupt? I stuck the credit card companies with $90,000 worth of bills. And they deserved it, because I used the money. They deserved it, and I used the money to finance the empowerment of the American people with the National Initiative, so you can make the laws.

Or as Gravel expressed himself to a reporter for Salon.com:

I thought about it: ‘My God, isn’t this interesting? I’m going to get these six credit card companies who have been predators on normal people. I’m going to get them to contribute to the National Initiative.’ And I filed bankruptcy just in a heartbeat, and that was it.”

When you add this to the consideration that Mike Gravel won his original Senate bid by misrepresenting his position on the Vietnam war, I don’t know how I could trust Mike Gravel in the presidency. He beat his Democratic rival for the Senate back in the 1960s by portraying himself as pro-war; he financed his dubious National Initiative scheme in this decade by reneging on his promise to pay back loans. Who else would he turn around on to “stick it to ‘em”? What else would he say that didn’t mean? Would he bankrupt the country to pursue an idea that wasn’t popular enough to be funded on the merits?

I know that Mike Gravel mouths some words that make people against war feel better, like the promise that he could magically get all the troops home from Iraq by this Christmas. I know that he mouths these words loudly and with apparent feeling. But I don’t know who Mike really is. Breaking promises is not idealistic. Deception is not progressive. Mike Gravel is not my candidate.

(Sources: September 25 2007 Democratic Presidential Debate; Salon.com May 7 2007; NPR News September 30 2007)

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