Former Sen. Mike Gravel pulls no punches. Photo by Reuters

Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel goes where no current presidential candidate will go — and where very, very few have gone before him: to the back alleys, where bruised knuckles are a badge of honor and battered egos have no place. In fact, so fond is he of a fight that the brawler sometimes even throws a punch at a supporter, if said supporter doesn’t have his facts straight.

Such was the case last Thursday at the University of Miami’s Meet and Greet, where Gravel not only set straight one of WVUM’s radio men by saying, “Don’t give me advice on strategy,” but also took a big stick to the whole campus. But Grampa Gravel isn’t smacking up students just because he’s stern; he’s smacking ’em up because he’s made of sterner stuff than most students get to see in this willy-nilly age of waffles and equivocation and “politics as usual.” To Gravel, it’s a question of “power over substance,” and until that changes we’re not gonna get anything substantial.

Let alone get anyone substantial occupying the corridors of power. The list of Gravel’s power brokering targets is long and apparently endless: He’s “frightened” of and by both Hillary and Barack (especially their refusal to discount the nuclear option in Iran); he called Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel a “son of a bitch” for suggesting the freshman class of congressional Democrats stay off The Colbert Report; and he proposes passing a law that would make it a crime to keep troops in Iraq and, one supposes, would consequently imprison the president (“commit a felony, you go to jail”).

It’s a contrary stance Gravel has, on occasion, put to good use, like back in ’71 when his one-man filibuster eventually ended the draft and when, in the same year, he inserted nearly 4,100 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and made moot any decision the Supreme Court was about to render the next day.

But if the Mike of then was a proverbial angry young man, the Mike of now is even angrier at what ails us — and mad for what might do us good.

Gravel’s a staunch advocate of Internet neutrality (“no restricted access to any site, for any reason”), reproductive rights (that’s a decision “between a woman and her doctor”), same-sex marriage (“What’s so bad about love?”), universal health care (“The U.S. is the only industrialized nation besides South Africa that doesn’t insure all its citizens”), energy independence (“five million windmills in five years”), legalizing pot (“You can go out and buy a fifth of gin and do more damage to yourself”), and he’s got a fair tax plan that would eliminate income tax (and the IRS!) and put in place a progressive national sales tax, granting rebates to lower-income households and eliminating the myriad ways the wealthy “game the system.”

Nothing, however, drives the ex-senator more than his national initiative, which promises to put the power back into the hands of the people. Think of the ballot initiatives that already exist in 24 states, and then make it national. It worked for Billy Jack when he went to Washington, and if Gravel’s nonprofit Democracy Foundation succeeds, it’ll work for us too.

First, though, the scrappy ex-senator’s gotta get elected and, as everyone but him apparently knows, that’s highly unlikely. Too bad, ’cause this firebrand’s brand of frank and honest would shake the White House down to its very foundation, not to mention stir the electorate into speaking for itself.

Maybe nobody likes a rabble-rouser anymore, but how the hell else is the rabble supposed to be roused?

Just ask Mike.