Mike Gravel

"A camel is a horse designed by committee." -- ascribed to Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis.

Perhaps the only thing more likely to yield ungainly results than a committee designing a horse is a Democrat designing a Republican presidential ticket. David Broder tries his hand at it in his WaPo column today, "Principles Amid the GOP Pack. The result is a double-humped dromedary known as McCain-Huckabee.

As related in my blog post yesterday, Dennis Kucinich felt that ABC News was unfair in the way it covered him following last Sunday's debate sponsored by that network. Well, statistical analysis provided of the words spoken and the time alloted to each candidate shows that ABC News was indeed extremely unfair to both Kucinich and Mike Gravel during the debate itself.  Here is the analysis by USA Election Polls:

We took a look at the entire ABC News Debate transcript from 8/19, parsed the file, and counted how many words each of the candidates were able to speak. The two candidates with the least amount of words were Kucinich and Gravel. Obama and Clinton as you would expect dominated in how many words they were able to speak.

Video (0:55): Real (1.51 MB) or Windows (1.74 MB), plus MP3 audio (305 kB)

As part of a new segment on the "Today" show called "Candidate Cribs," NBC's Jonathan Alter went on a cab ride, with Democratic candidate Mike Gravel behind the wheel. However, Alter received more than a calm cruise through the city from the former Alaskan senator. In a gimmicky stunt, meant to showcase the candidate's past life as a New York City cabbie, Alter slid into the back seat for a ride but just after Gravel started griping about Iraq he crashed the taxi.

Alter: "Gravel is best remembered for helping end the Vietnam era draft with a filibuster and for reading the Pentagon Papers in the Senate. Now, after a quarter-century out of politics, he's an angry Rip Van Winkle."

Gravel: "I know how to get out of Iraq. I know how to affect the solution, it's a diplomatic solution."

Alter: "Careful! Ohh!"