Don't worry, be Mike Gravel

No job, no money, no problem -- after personal setbacks, the quirky Alaskan returns to his first love as a long-shot contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Democratic Party, U.S. Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Alaska, Politics, Israel, News, John Edwards, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Alex Koppelman, Mike Gravel

Photo: Reuters/Jim Bourg

Mike Gravel responds to a question April 26 at the Democratic presidential candidates' debate in Orangeburg, S.C.

May 7, 2007 | NEW YORK -- If Mike Gravel, the former senator from Alaska now running for president as a quasi-lefty long shot, can be said to have a base, then he should have been standing right in the thick of it Wednesday night.

Fresh from taping an appearance on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" in midtown Manhattan, Gravel and press secretary Alex Colvin took an impromptu drive down to Cooper Union in the East Village. Six blocks north of the defunct punk-rock club CBGB, venerable leftist historian Howard Zinn was leading a group of actors and musicians, including Danny Glover, Ally Sheedy and Steve Earle, in a selection of readings and songs, such as Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," Allen Ginsberg's "America," and speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. and Cindy Sheehan. But when the 76-year-old Gravel, white-haired and clad in the dark suit and red tie that are the uniform for all male presidential candidates, strode into the back of the crowded auditorium almost two hours after the event began, there was little hint that the mostly graying throng in attendance recognized him. What notice Gravel did get was from one 30-something man who told him to keep up the fight, and from two gushing, acne-marked teenagers who asked for an autograph and promised their vote if he continued sticking to the issues.

Gravel, who drove a cab when he lived in New York and attended Columbia University more than 50 years ago, had weathered 60 blocks and 45 minutes of post-rush-hour Manhattan traffic to be at the event. But he shook no hands that were not offered to him. And though he had expected to get backstage and see his old friend Zinn, after a minute of bewildered negotiation he was told sharply that he would have to wait -- the kind of reprimand that is simply not given to a presidential candidate. Instead of arguing he turned for the door. He didn't want to be a nuisance to Zinn, he explained halfheartedly. "After an event like this one," he said, "no one wants someone they haven't seen in years coming up and shaking their hand and saying, 'How are you!?'" Mean, angry Mike Gravel, the man who had said during the first Democratic presidential debate that the other candidates "frighten[ed]" him, who demanded of Sen. Barack Obama, "Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?" just gave up and walked away.

But there were those three people who recognized him, two of them eager political neophytes starstruck in Gravel's mere presence. That's the audience Gravel, who was the first Democrat to announce his candidacy for president, is slowly beginning to attract. According to On Politics, a blog by USA Today, Gravel's name became the 15th most popular search in the blogosphere shortly after the debate. A YouTube video of him at the debate has been viewed more than 200,000 times, and, according to a graph of traffic stats provided by Alexa and posted at Students for Gravel, in late April and early May, Gravel's Web site had more traffic than those of the three Democratic front-runners.

Gravel's support seems to be coming from those disaffected Democrats who, tired of politics as usual, watched the debate and saw a fiery man no one had heard from for 25 years saying things no other candidate would dare. After the debate, the image of Gravel as a sort of cross between Adm. James Stockdale and Grampa Simpson -- crotchety, rambling and maybe a little dotty -- is congealing into conventional wisdom in the snarkier quarters of the mainstream media. But there are some Democratic primary voters who not only don't mind cantankerousness but relish it as the mark of a plain speaker. They like a candidate who insists on being quoted calling Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a "son of a bitch" for saying the freshman class of congressional Democrats should avoid "The Colbert Report." And though they may never have heard of Gravel before, his new fans are enjoying a glimpse of the bomb-throwing senator of three decades past, whose filibusters and unorthodox tactics made him both loved and hated among the public and his Senate peers, and who, then and now, has always seemed oblivious to the long odds against him.

Over dinner at a Manhattan coffee shop after the Zinn event, as Gravel and company, now joined by a scruffy middle-aged Green Party supporter who identified himself only as "zool," drank the four minibar-sized bottles of red wine that came in the "Colbert Report's" goody bag, Gravel reminisced about his combative tenure in Congress. He admitted that by 1980, when he went down to defeat in a Democratic primary after 12 years in the Senate, he had alienated "almost every constituency in Alaska."

"I was like Richard III inside my armor with all the scar tissue," he says. "All you had to do was blow on me and I'd fall over." With that, he retired from politics, disgusted, he says, "with public service, with the way government operated."

Now, however, he is broke, unemployed and happy. He has, in his own words, "zero net worth." His Senate pension all goes to his ex-wife, and he hasn't earned a regular paycheck in years. Since leaving the Senate he has endured two bankruptcies, one corporate and, just three years ago, one personal. He doesn't care. He quotes mythology scholar Joseph Campbell, who advised everyone to "follow your bliss." He and his wife have "difficulties" financially, he says, but he also says he has never been more content.

Mike Gravel is just following his bliss, and for him, that's always been politics. He caught the bug growing up in Springfield, Mass., the child of blue-collar French-Canadian immigrants. At 26, after a few years in the military and then graduation from Columbia, he began thinking about where he could move to get his start as a politician. "I had no money, I had no name and no contacts. So I thought I might as well go some place and start from scratch." He narrowed his choices down to Alaska and New Mexico, and chose Alaska because he didn't like warm weather.

"When I got there, I was broke. It was probably about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I was at a gas station, and I asked the guy, 'Do you know where I can get a job?' I didn't care -- any job. I was broke. He says, 'I've got a friend who's a manager of a real estate company. I'll give him a call, and why don't you show up there Monday morning?'"

He got the job. In the fall of 1958, two years after his arrival, while Alaska was still a territory, he ran for what would become, in January 1959, Alaska's first state Legislature. He lost. By the 1960 election, Gravel was prevented by new residency requirements from running for the Legislature, so he ran for the Anchorage City Council instead. He lost. In 1962, he finally won election to the state House of Representatives. By the start of his second two-year term in 1965, the articulate and handsome New Englander was speaker of the Alaska House.

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