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| 2007 Primaries: | Clinton's book | Edwards' book | Giuliani's book | Huckabee's book | Obama's book | Richardson's book | 2007 Debates |
Citizen Power A People's Platform, by Mike Gravel (published 1972)  (Click for Amazon book review) BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org: This book was written in 1972 by the former Senator, Mike Gravel. Make that "very former" Senator -- the book was written during the heyday of the Watergate and Vietnam protest movements, participants in which considered Gravel a hero. The most surprising aspect of this book is how current it is, despite having been written 35 years ago. Sure, Gravel bashes Nixon a lot -- but the same complaints apply today if the reader substitutes "Bush" for "Nixon." Gravel discusses the issues of his day -- CO2 emissions, government secrecy, workfare, healthcare delivery -- and many of those same issues prevail as the dominant topics in the 2008 presidential race. Perhaps that's why Gravel chose to run 35 years later -- because the solutions which were obvious to him then have still not been implemented, despite 35 years of people proposing the same solutions. His 2008 presidential race focuses on changing the legislative process -- allowing citizen-based ballot initiatives as a new grassroots source of legislation -- because after 35 years, Gravel sees that just proposing sensible policies is not enough. Take a look at one verbatim example from p. 233: The abrogation of the people's right to know--one of the system's most important checks and balances--caused this nation to make this colossal mistake of waging a war that has nothing to do with our security, individually or as a nation.Gravel was talking about the Vietnam war, but the same words could describe millions of people's criticism of the Iraq war. This is the sort of excerpt that makes historians scream, "If we don't learn from history, we're destined to repeat it." Gravel 's candidacy is forcing the 2008 electorate to learn from history -- applying Nixon's desire for secrecy to Bush; and applying the problems of centralization of presidential power from Vietnam to Iraq. Unfortunately, this book is hard to come by. It is no longer in print; and the Gravel campaign had no copies either. OnTheIssues had to order an old signed copy, used, from an online book vendor, at ten times the cover price. The Gravel campaign could do the American public a great service by reprinting this book so that voters could see the obvious parallels from 1972. -- Jesse Gordon, jesse@OnTheIssues.org, May 2007 P.S. March 2008 -- Gravel's campaign did follow that advice and released Citizen Power: Mandate for Change in 2008.
A People's Platform, by Mike Gravel (published 1972).
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