Democratic presidential primary candidate and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel harshly criticized the candidacies of former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg in an exclusive interview with Hill.TV Thursday.
Gravel singled out Buttigieg, saying “the most out of step one, I don’t know if its accurate, the Mayor of Indiana who is running…who really doesn’t say anything more than the fact that he’s gay and that energizes the gay community.”
Gravel’s unusual campaign is run by a pair of Democratic teenagers who have commandeered his twitter account to rail against the Democratic establishment. Gravel ran for the Democratic nomination unsuccessfully in 2008 and has long railed against U.S. entanglements abroad.
There are Democrats who are hardly democrats and many democrats who opt not to be Democrats. But Mike Gravel is a proud democrat who also happens to be a Democrat. And that, sadly, is increasingly rare.
— Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) May 8, 2019
Asked for his thoughts on leading Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Gravel noted the two shared a good working relationship in the U.S. Senate but added “you have to look at what this person represents ideologically.”
“Biden ideologically is off the rails. He’s conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is off the rails in the United States,” the former Alaska senator continued.
Gravel also took aim at the former vice president for his handling of the Anita Hill hearings conducted while Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee saying “Joe was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he wasn’t a kid. He’d been in the Congress long enough to know the difference between right and wrong. When he was Chairman he denied the ability to bring in two additional witnesses that would have corroborated Anita Hill.”
Gravel does not plan on seriously seeking the presidency himself, instead vying for an opportunity to get on the Democratic primary debate stage and bring attention to his ideas.
“The goal of a Gravel 2020 campaign would not be to win, but instead to draw attention to the central issues that Sen. Gravel has focused on over the previous decades,” a draft version of his campaign plan indicates, adding “the ultimate goal would be to gain media attention and then endorse either Rep. Gabbard or Sen. Bernie Sanders before the Iowa caucuses.”
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