Mike Gravel is not suspending his presidential campaign following the news that he did not make the cut for the first Democratic debate.
The former Alaska senator told the Washington Examiner shortly after news broke that he didn’t make the stage that, although he was disappointed, he would continue his campaign in an attempt to make the stage for the next Democratic debate slated for July.
“What we’re going to do is we’re going to get qualified for the July [debate] and we’ll get qualified at some point,” he said.
The 89-year-old Gravel’s campaign is largely run by two teenagers, Henry Williams and David Oks, who encouraged Gravel to enter the fray after learning about his policy positions. Gravel said that he gave them access to his Twitter account, which the teens run.
Gravel previously ran for president in 2008 and had some criticism for the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Tom Perez. He said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was “cheated” out of the 2008 Democratic nomination.
“I’m very suspicious of the DNC since it’s controlled by Perez and essentially the leftover Clinton crowd,” he said. “So, we’ll see how they conduct themselves.”
“They cheated [Sanders] out of the nomination. And we’ll see how they try to sabotage him under the present circumstances,” Gravel added.
Gravel said he did not think the DNC was trying to sabotage his 2020 campaign.
Gravel praised the teens running his campaign, calling them “wonderfully precocious, and intelligent, and sophisticated.”
“The fact that we’re running a campaign directed by these kids has brought us a great deal of attention and [celebrity] that I didn’t have before,” the former senator said.
Gravel served as one of Alaska’s senators from 1969 to 1981 and gained notoriety for publicizing portions of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. He ran for president in 2008, but his bid failed to gain much traction among Democrats. After ending his quest for the Democratic nomination, Gravel switched to the Libertarian Party in another unsuccessful nomination run.
Gravel is adamantly anti-war and recently touted the endorsement of Muntadher al-Zaidi, the man who famously threw his shoes at outgoing President George W. Bush in 2008.
