I’m all for watching candidates who are capable of “making the other smoothies on stage a little uncomfortable” – I just want those candidates to also be capable of saying something halfway interesting, and maybe even capable of winning some votes as well. ~Ross Douthat

Now, Ross, you can’t tell me that talking about Bin Laden “rolling in his blankets” over the Iraq invasion wasn’t at least halfway interesting.  It would have had to intrigue viewers by making them sit up and ask: “Who’s that old guy talking about Bin Laden’s sleep habits?”  Of course, the substantive point (there was one in there somewhere) was right, albeit redundant, since I imagine only the most die-hard of the “they aren’t reporting the good news from Iraq” brigades believe that Al Qaeda has been weakened by the Iraq war.  A majority of Democrats are fiercely opposed to the Iraq war (far more than Obama or even Edwards), and at least some of them are actually something close to non-interventionist (or they are heading in that direction), but without Gravel and Kucinich those people would be more or less completely unrepresented in their own party’s candidate debates.  Simply by being there, they force the candidates dubbed “major” by the media to take account of the constituencies in their own party that they would be only too happy to ignore.  If these no-hope candidates are monomaniacal and obsessive in the process, they are no less interesting than the pre-packaged, dreary, rehearsed lines of the “respectable” candidates.  Journalists obviously love them because they provide something actually interesting to report on the next day, rather than having to write the boring, “no one said anything of any real importance” copy that normally follows these staged farces.   

From media reports, it seems that Gravel made (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically) at least a few worthwhile points that tended to get obscured by his talk of feeling like a potted plant.  He noted that our sanctions on Iran have accomplished nothing.  He is correct.  He pointed out the relative hypocrisy of demanding nonproliferation from other states while preparing to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.  Except for Kucinich, no one else on that stage, if he wanted to remain “viable,” could have ever said either of these things.  Those strike me as things that need saying in public debates more often, so if only no-hopers are allowed to say them and introduce them into the debate I say that we need a lot more no-hopers running for President. 

Of other candidates, he said:

Mr. Gravel said he had made that statement before he had the chance to stand with the other candidates a few times. “It’s like going into the Senate,” he said. “You know the first time you get there you’re all excited — ‘My God, how did I ever get here?’ And then, about six months later, you say, ‘How the hell did the rest of them get here?’ ”

Who couldn’t appreciate a candidate who would say this on the record?

Perhaps Gravel seemed less interesting if you watched him live on television, but I, for one, would have been glad to see someone on that stage say that he finds the major Democratic candidates frightening.  Given Obama’s foreign policy speech, Edwards’ little Herzliya gig and Hillary Clinton being, well, Hillary Clinton, it’s fair to say that they are frightening in their foreign policy views.  It’s a sorry state of affairs when the joke candidate from Alaska is just about the only one with the guts or zaniness to say so in a nationally televised forum.