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"Feed the meter."

A young man in a dark suit walks over to Gravel. "Good morning, sir. And you're with what group?"

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Gravel brushes at his silver hair, smiles and extends a hand. "I'm Mike Gravel. I'm running for president."

"Oh, yeah?" The young man chuckles, as though suspecting he's being played with here. "President, huh?"

Gravel gets this a lot. "Uh-huh. I'm speaking here this morning."

At that moment, an older man rushes up to him, hand outstretched. "Senator Gravel, nice to see you. Thanks so much for coming."

A few middle-aged men gather around Gravel. One guy raises a finger. "Whatever gave you the idea for that campaign spot you guys have done? Saw it on YouTube. It's hilarious."

Gravel's knot of listeners leans closer.

"That's not a campaign spot," Gravel says. "The --"

"It cracked me up, senator. Particularly that one where you're just staring into the camera and saying nothing. And then throwing that rock into the pond and --"

This is his lot in life: to be ready to talk about his ideas, only to be cut off by somebody dying to know about this video that he didn't create. "It was made by two young art teachers from Los Angeles," he says.

Overnight, the screen time made Gravel, if nothing else, a subject of fascination on the Internet and led to the mistaken belief that he masterminded the video. He answers truthfully when asked about it: He simply did as he was told by the two art teachers. At the teachers' urging, he picked up the rock, threw it in the pond, turned and, as he tells the men in the hotel, "walked down a road."