Again to Democratic Candidate #8… 9 if you count Gore… 10 if you count Shparton… 11 if you go ahead and toss in Vilsack… 14 if you want to add some candidates who thought of entering but didn’t…
This is either brilliant out-of-the-box thinking on Mike Gravel’s part or it’s too cute for its own good.
At the last Democratic shin-dog with all the candidates, sometime before his statement that amounted to the admission that he’s mostly just trying to sell us the National Initiative and he has no particular plans of coming anywhere near close to the Presidency.
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GRAVEL: I’m not much of a cheerleader. And so I’d rather be dealing with some sober statements. And that is, I’m not entirely convinced that the Democrats can get the next presidency of the United States. And I’ll tell you why: because that’s going to be determined, by and large, by the American people over the next two years as to how the Democratic candidates conduct themselves with respect to the Iraq war.
GRAVEL: Just stop and think. In October 2011 (sic), the Republicans and the Democrats bought George Bush’s fraud as to whether we needed to invade on a preemptive reason to invade Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. And so you can understand an interesting comparison. Stop and think. There were tens of millions of Americans who held that exact view that we shouldn’t invade Iraq.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, if tens of millions of Americans had that view, why couldn’t we have had that view with the majority of the Congress of the United States?
(APPLAUSE) We’ll never make it with politics as usual, and there is an answer. And it’s not a mealy-mouth, non-binding resolution. And even if it were binding, it would be unconstitutional.
Look what happened. The Democrat leadership in the Congress is setting it up and giving cover to the Republicans. The Republicans said that, hey, they were expecting to lose 50 votes in the House race when this issue came up. They lost only 17. What happened? We gave them cover by talking about things that are unconstitutional. And so now the Republicans can charge the Democrats, well, they’re not really doing anything. Murtha wants to get out and play general. Other people want to cap. You can’t cap. It’s unconstitutional. The president is the commander in chief, like it or not. But the Congress, under the Constitution, has the right to declare war and has the right to end it. What they need to do is put up a law and put it before the House — they’ve got the votes — pass it there. It goes to the Senate. They’ll have a filibuster. It’ll last about a week and a half, two weeks, because Leader Reid can bring it up every day — every day — and have a cloture vote and let these Republicans wither on the vine. And then it goes to the president. After the president gets it, he’s got a choice. He can continue to believe in God, or he can turn around and end the war.
(APPLAUSE) Well, I think that he’s going to go. He’s going to figure God can trump the Congress. And so now, he’s going to veto it. It comes back to the Congress, and we have created a constitutional crisis between the executive, the Congress, and the American people. And the American people can understand this. And if you count the 50 that they thought they would lose in the House, you have enough in the House to override the veto. That brings it to the Senate. And the Senate, again, with time, will wither on the vine. And we could get out of Iraq within the next six months, under this scenario. Otherwise, George Bush is going to keep it going for the next two years. And the oil there is not worth one more American dead. It’s not worth one ounce of blood.
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He mentioned Lyndon Johnson, which is curious of course because, in his Senate campaign of 1968… I’m just saying…