PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE agrees that Dennis Kucinich is a long shot for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Everyone, that is, but the man himself. Kucinich, who represents Ohio’s 10th District in Congress, has run for office 18 times in the last 35 years. He got started with a petition to run for Cleveland city council as a college sophomore in 1967, before he was old enough to vote. And he is confident about campaign number 19: “I fully expect to be the nominee of this party,” said Kucinich earlier this month, “and I fully expect to be the president of the United States.”
Trailing major candidates by millions in campaign contributions, Kucinich, 56, has been surpassed by everyone but Carol Moseley Braun in fundraising, and is polling at less than 1 percent among voters nationally.
But Kucinich has beaten long odds before. He won a seat in the House and has held it for four terms after coming off one term in the Ohio Senate, 15 years in political exile, and a single term as mayor of Cleveland that even he described as “absolute chaos.” On Kucinich’s watch, Cleveland became the only municipality to formally default on its debts since the Great Depression. His refusal to sell off the public utility Muny Light in order to avoid bankruptcy earned him a few dedicated supporters, but when the “boy mayor”came up for reelection in 1979, he was soundly defeated.
During his tenure as mayor–which coincided with Jerry Springer’s stint as mayor of Cincinnati and Jerry Brown’s second term as “Governor Moonbeam” in California–Kucinich banned nuns from City Hall, held a press conference to fire a popular police chief on Good Friday, and was so hated that he had to wear a bulletproof vest when he threw out the first pitch of the 1978 Indians season. He survived a recall vote by just 236 votes out of more than 120,000 votes cast. But he remains proud of his Cleveland ties, promising in an early campaign appearance to “replace Crawford, Texas’s square dancing, tractor pulls, and pork rinds with Cleveland’s polka, bowling, and kielbasa.”
A self-described “dynamic, visionary leader . . . who combines powerful activism with a spiritual sense of the essential interconnectedness of all living things,” Kucinich has recently become a vegan at the urging of his girlfriend, and is the leading opponent of genetically modified foods in Congress. He would prefer, he says, to “go right for the ban,” but last year he worked with Sen. Barbara Boxer to introduce four bills targeted at crippling manufacturers of GM foods.
Kucinich’s belief in the “interconnectedness of all living things” is central to his philosophy of governance. “Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe,” he explained last summer at the Praxis Peace Institute Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia. “Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self.”
Kucinich’s thoughts often turn to the heavens, it seems. In 2001, he introduced a bill to ban space-based weapons. The bill would ban the use of “radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies . . . for the purpose of information war, mood management, or mind control.”
So it is clear why few are optimistic about Kucinich’s chances for the presidency. He’s a little odd. Far worse than his personal quirks in the eyes of primary voters, however, are his unorthodox positions on some major issues.
The Nation has called Kucinich a “regressive progressive.” And his voting record shows more than the ordinary share of conservative moments for a Democrat, including his 1997 vote in favor of a constitutional amendment banning flag burning and his support for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
But Kucinich’s biggest point of divergence from the Democratic party has been abortion. The week he entered the presidential race, Kucinich, a Catholic, announced that his thinking on abortion had “evolved.” Despite consistently voting with pro-lifers on bills regarding RU-486, partial birth, and parental consent, he now says, “I believe in choice”–an abrupt about-face for a man who recently received a zero on the National Abortion Rights Action League scorecard.
When asked to explain this change of heart, Kucinich said, “It took a lot for me in the last Congress to recognize what I saw was an agenda being developed that would divide this nation.” As the Cleveland Scene quipped, “Abortion, a wedge issue? Say it ain’t so!”
One can’t help but suspect Kucinich’s reversal has more to do with politics than personal evolution, but with Kucinich it’s hard to tell, since such flip-flops have characterized his public career, particularly on Iraq.
Kucinich voted to disarm Iraq in 1998, but has since become a vehement advocate of peace at any price. He led House Democratic opposition to the resolution authorizing force in late 2002. He called for lifting the sanctions on Iraq for years, but now says the sanctions would have worked in the absence of war, and that he always supported “smart sanctions.”
Frequent statements like, “Let us support the troops, but not the administration. Let us support the troops by bringing them home alive and healthy!” earned Kucinich a few moments in the difficult-to-grab wartime spotlight, but little support in a Democratic field crowded with antiwar candidates.
When Kucinich reintroduced a bill for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace on April 8, the idea garnered more national attention than it had the first time around. It actually earned a front-page story in the Washington Post. Front page of the Style section, that is, below the fold, beaten out by an enormous photo of scruffy actor Colin Farrell. Still, it was coverage in a major paper for what had been previously dismissed as a “crackpot idea.” Such is the power of the prospective presidential candidate.
The Department of Peace, which has 46 other sponsors in the House, would be responsible for developing policies to address all kinds of violence, domestic and international. The bill features plans to establish a Peace Academy offering a four-year program in “peace studies,” followed by five years of mandatory service at home or abroad.
The department, says Kucinich, would get at the “root causes” of violence and war. “Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Hopelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. No health care is a weapon of mass destruction.”
Activist and Kucinich adviser Carol Rosin, who helped send Timothy Leary’s cremated remains into space, sees the situation in similarly apocalyptic terms. Kucinich’s election, she says, “is the only chance we have to get to enter into a new paradigm, or otherwise we are all going to die.”
Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
