It's No Accident

Dennis Kucinich is a great and principled political leader. He is a rarity among politicians of all kinds -- let alone members of the US Congress -- in that he fights unflinchingly for the people. His distinguished record goes back as far as his early tenure as mayor of Cleveland in the late 1970s, when he saved the city's municipal power system from being sold off to the robber barons of the power companies -- a move that eventually cost him his mayoralty as the companies (and the city's creditors!) piled on. The official media story that the "boy mayor of Cleveland" was a failure has stuck with him ever since, even though most people in Cleveland eventually realized that it wasn't true. Fifteen years after the fact, everyone knew he was right to do what he did, and he could get elected to the state senate -- despite the Gingrich wave of 1994 -- on the slogan "Kucinich: Because He Was Right." Since then his working-class district has elected him to Congress by wide margins, and he has been a voice of principle despite ridicule by the powerful.

Political leaders should not be punished for being right, which is why you should applaud Kucinich's entry into the race for the presidency even if you think his campaign is such a longshot that you won't even consider participating in it. I agree with the criticism of his 2004 campaign that he did not have the right people at the table from the very beginning, that his core supporters ended up being mostly the flakier leftists, and that he ended up looking like an isolated gadfly as a result. The whole thing was painful to watch, because Kucinich is not like that at all; he is a real fighter with a real base, and an unfailingly serious person. It is disgusting that we have a political and media system that so thoroughly undermines people of substance like Dennis.

Here's to hoping that this time, his supporters and his campaign will be a constructive force in adding to the debate and pushing the national mood to the left. I doubt very much if he has the capacity to generate the kind of Rainbow-like energy that we need to do something like that. John Edwards -- whose politics are nowhere near as reliable as Kucinich's -- could prove a more useful vehicle for that purpose. I am not wedded to the Kucinich campaign -- but I will not attack it. My watchword for 2008 is pas d'enemies a gauche!

Tags: kucinich, 2008, John Edwards, no enemies to the left