Kucinich Reloaded

By Melinda Welsh, Sacramento News & Review. Posted June 9, 2003.

The first time I met Dennis Kucinich was in 1978 on a tour of solar homes in Davis, California. The youngest person ever elected leader of a large American city, Cleveland’s mayor was a fast-talking, blue-collar, populist kid with a progressive vision for the future. He favored radical politics, renewable energy and something called economic democracy. The people who loved him called him “boy wonder.” The ones who didn’t dubbed him “Dennis the Menace.”

In college at the time, I remember riding around in the back seat of a friend’s Camaro with the famous boy mayor, talking to him about electoral politics and the future of the country. Secretly, I wondered how somebody so young could be so self-possessed, so utterly confident.

Fast forward to last week and the second time I met Kucinich. Now a Congressman from Ohio and co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus in Washington, D.C., he was back in town 25 years later – this time seeking support in his bid for America’s top job, a.k.a. the presidency. With no name recognition, almost no money and no real chance at winning, Kucinich – an unabashed leftist – barnstormed California anyway, like a New Age, one-man argument for the power of optimism. “We must be relentless in our hopes,” he told me in a private conversation just before he took the stage in Davis. “We cannot falter, especially in times when things seem to be moving so powerfully in another direction.”

To say Kucinich hopes for a miracle is an understatement.

Positioned squarely at the bottom of a field of nine Democratic candidates for the party’s nomination, many wonder what reason he could have for doing it. As it turns out, there is a reason. It has to do with guts and ego and doggedness and, ultimately, the desire to do positive works on behalf of regular people. It’s like when Morpheus in The Matrix Reloaded tells Niobe, “Some things never change. And some things do.”

Kucinich hasn’t changed. But he’s hoping the country might.

Dressed neatly in a black T-shirt and creased, green khakis that looked straight off the Gap rack, Kucinich strode back and forth on the stage of the community theater with a handheld microphone, preaching up a storm – can he get a witness? – and blasting the Bush administration for its wrongful war, assault on the environment, and shabby economics. The candidate moved hips-first, like they tell models on the runway to do. He exuded calm, but he knew how to work the crowd into a frenzy, too. A democrat from his home state put it this way: “He makes a lot of noise for a little guy.”

“The nation has become disconnected from its purpose,” Kucinich stormed to the cheering crowd of 400 faithful. “We must break this spell of war! We must get this country back on the path of peace!

No one at the event seemed there for conversion; they’d already joined the club. After a question-and-answer session with adoring audience members, Kucinich immersed himself, Kennedy-like, into the crowd for more well-wishes, handshakes and hugs. “The nation is at a transformational moment,” he told the crowd. “All paths seem to lead to war and destruction. But we can change the country starting from this time, this place, in this space.” To deliver that last line, Kucinich stepped unconsciously to the very apex of the stage, his feet quite literally balancing over the platform’s rim and a 4-foot drop-off. Was Kucinich worried about plunging head-first over the edge? Hardly.

From poor Catholic kid to vegan liberal

Kucinich was raised working-class Catholic, the oldest of seven children. His father was a Marine and a truck driver; his family struggled, even living out of a car for a while. When Kucinich graduated from college, he was the first person in his family – on either side – ever to do so.

Like many in his generation, he underwent a political awakening during the Vietnam War era. Pretty soon, he got the idea in his head that he would get into city politics. In 1969, Kucinich ran for city council and won. Soon, he earned a reputation for being smart, liberal, hard-working and stubborn as hell; it’s the same reputation he has today. Somewhere along the way, he became a vegan, too, because he came to believe in “the sacredness of all species.”

In 1977, he was elected mayor and inherited a giant mess. A previous administration had misspent tens of millions in bond funds, and the banks came to the young mayor in a power play, saying that unless he agreed to sell MUNY Light, the city’s municipal electric utility, the banks would call in the loans and send the city into default. “They were trying to blackmail me,” said Kucinich. Despite enormous pressure to sell the utility, Kucinich refused, and Cleveland went bankrupt. Everyone thought the boy mayor’s political career was over. Even he thought that.

But Kucinich prevailed. Even his harshest critics today admit that history has vindicated him, that he was right to refuse to sell MUNY Light. After a long hiatus, Kucinich returned to politics, first as a senator and then as a congressman. From Washington, D.C., he’s led successful crusades for his district. He has kept hospitals open, saved a steel mill and changed rail traffic in Ohio neighborhoods.

But it was in the aftermath of 9/11 that Kucinich unexpectedly came to inherit a national platform upon which to speak. In February 2002, Kucinich gave a talk in Southern California called “A Prayer for America” that struck a chord with millions. With most Democrats bowing down before Bush – thanks to his unprecedented popularity in the polls and for fear that they would be labeled unpatriotic if they criticized him – Kucinich’s prayer came across as a breath of fresh air.

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