First Democrat to Announce Candidacy for President on Monday
Published on Thursday, April 13, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
by Joe Lauria
Senator Mike Gravel, D-Alaska
NEW YORK — Mike Gravel, a former U.S. senator from Alaska, will next week become the first Democrat to formally declare his candidacy for president.
Nearly two years before the Iowa caucuses kick off the presidential campaign, Gravel will announce his bid to become the Democratic White House hopeful at a news conference Monday at the National Press Club in Washington. He will file his papers today with the Federal Election Commission.
Many of us Remember Gravel, and his Service To Country, at a time when the Need was So Great!!
Gravel served in the Senate from 1969 to 1981, during the turbulent last years of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. He is hoping voters respond to his anti-war stance, drawing on the parellels being made between Vientam and Iraq.
Gravel is perhaps best known for staging a one-man filibuster leading to the end of the military draft as well as for reading the Pentagon Papers into the record at a hastily arranged Senate committee hearing at the end of June 1971. A day after he did so the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the Justice Department’s prior restraint on the publication of the papers in the press.
Gravel later lost a Supreme Court decision in spring 1972 to allow publishing the classified documents in book form by Beacon Press in Boston. The Nixon administration chose not to prosecute him or Beacon and publication went forward. The court had ruled that Gravel had immunity from prosecution only within the confines of the Senate chambers.
Gravel says he is also motivated to run by his opposition to the Iraq war and by a desire to reverse the level of secrecy in government. He is particularly critical of Democrats who supported the invasion.
“They did not have good intelligence and they should have had the judgment to perceive this,” he said. `When the administration puts a classification on a document, members of Congress stand there like frozen zombies.”
At 75, Gravel acknowledges that age will be made an issue in his campaign. “Now when people talk about age, let’s really look at age,” he said. “Nelson Mandela was in his mid-seventies when he became the head of South Africa, the chancellor who rebuilt Germany, Konrad Adenauer, was in his 80s and then my hero of all time, Pope John XXIII, who they put into power at 68, did more in four years than had been done in the Catholic Church for over 500 years.”
Gravel sees Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York as the clear Democratic frontrunner. “She can be unseated if somebody would be aggressive,” he said. “I’ll challenge her and any other candidate on the issues. The Democratic Party has to stand for something if it wants power.”
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