Skeptic Project

I Hate Mike Gravel
Mike Gravel sucks. It's just that simple. He dashed my dreams and I hate him for it.

Jen and I went into last week's Who the Hell is Mike Gravel? Day festivities with an overriding hope: that we would stumble on a quixotic candidate filled with promise and moxie. After an already-tiring early presidential campaign we wanted to tilt at windmills for a bit.

Well, Gravel (pronounced gra-VELLE, by the way...already annoying) is not the unfairly dismissed voice of the people. Instead, he's a damn idiot with the sophistication of a freshman PoliSci douche who thinks "politicians are evil" yet wants to be a politician more than anything.

The evening began at a very swank bar on the Lower East Side, with suited operatives standing guard at the door. At the official start time, my wife and I formed two-thirds of the audience. Slowly, however, folks began to trickle in and the crowd "swelled" to about two dozen.

Gravel made an entrance with unnecessary pomp and began a rambling 20 minute speech on how he's the only one who can bring sense back to Washington. Except for one problem: all his ideas were bullshit.

His signature idea is a national ballot initiative program that would allow people to petition to get legislation on a national ballot. This is such an incredibly bad idea. Foremost among the problems is this: how many signatures will it take to get a question on the ballot? If the threshold is low so as to give lots of people a chance to get their ideas heard, then the ballot will be larded with initiatives and no voter could reasonably read up on all of them. On the other hand, if the number of signatures is high, then the same big corporations, labor unions and other big-money players that already inordinate power over the political process would simply flex that power by bankrolling signature-gathering operations.

So, I asked Gravel what he thought would happen if his ballot initiative process was in place in the run-up to the Iraq War, since upwards of 65 percent of people were supportive of it. He then literally yelled at me and told me that I didn't know what I was talking about and that the American people were "BRAINWASHED!" He had no substantive comeback...and his website explaining the process is all jargon and little substance.

Then, a CPA in the audience asked about Gravel's other signature proposal: ending the income tax and instituting a 23 percent across-the-board sales tax. Wouldn't this hurt poor people who spend a far greater percentage of their income on consumer goods like food and clothes, the CPA asked? Once again, Gravel told this trained accountant he didn't know anything about the tax system and that "Bill Gates buys a $150 million house and, under my proposal, he'd get taxed for that." Stupid. It's like no one has ever asked him the most simple questions about his policy ideas.

Overall, the night dragged on far too long. Gravel was uninspiring, uninformed and, frankly, unpresidential. Looks like the big media folks know what they're doing when they ignore this buffoon. He is not Santa Claus.

http://www.yourenojackkennedy.com/2007/04/i-hate-mike-gravel.html