Mike Gravel, Candidate for Mayor of Berkeley

David Weigel | February 5, 2008

Mike Gravel, liberaltarian and reason subscriber (he and his lovely wife Wendy have confirmed this) is the third Democrat who'll appear on most Super Tuesday ballots. Until 1980, he was a senator from Alaska, so I wondered whether he'd be trying to score a delegate or two there.

Nope. He's in California today, giving a speech at Berkeley. And tomorrow, after the California primary, he's... still in Berkeley.

It's a pretty clear sign that what began as a wacky quest to push the National Initiative, then morphed into a quixotic anti-war presidential bid, has morphed again into a wacky quest to push the National Initiative and end the war. Which makes sense. If we got an up-or-down vote on it, we'd probably be out of Iraq. (We would probably also ban smoking and declare that the government planned 9/11, two reasons to be against national initiatives.)