Muslims For Kucinich

DES MOINES — To the audience at the Iowa Federation of Labor’s first presidential forum of the year, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was putting on a table-pounding show of union solidarity.

Kucinich, who had only recently begun to introduce himself to Iowa Democrats as a presidential contender, was making a strong first impression on the union leadership. He held up his membership card for the Camera Operators Union and declared he would make the White House “the address of Workers Local No. 1.” Speaking louder and faster than any of the other candidates in attendance, he shouted, “This election is about your right to have a government that you can call your own — a people’s president. A workers’ White House!”
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Iowa Federation of Labor President Mark Smith, sitting behind the podium, could see that more than union spirit was driving Kucinich’s almost manic performance. After learning that the Adventureland Inn was ill-equipped to download and print his speech, Kucinich had perched his laptop computer on the podium.
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Smith said he could see that the diminutive congressman was struggling to balance the computer and that the screen kept him from adjusting the microphone. To make matters worse, the battery alarm had begun to beep, forcing him to speed-read before losing his text. “I think he yelled because he was further from the mike than was comfortable,” Smith said.
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Six months later, Kucinich is still engaged in a balancing act. Democratic activists say he’s hitting the right buttons on issues such as peace, economic opportunity and health care, but they’re having trouble juggling concerns that he’s too liberal or too quirky to win the nomination, let alone wrest the presidency from Republican George W. Bush. Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack admits that her first impression of Kucinich was formed by his antics at her husband’s annual fund-raising picnic. “I will always think of him as like, Rumpelstiltskin, because he was just waving his arms around and carrying on, because he really just got so emotional up there, so much that he burst into the Star Spangled Banner,” she said.
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His campaign is as creative as it is low-budget. He’s known for handing out baseball cards featuring photos of himself and campaign issues that have become collectible memorabilia. His campaign office in Des Moines has corn stalks growing outside. Since he’s a vegan who doesn’t consume animal products, he held a campaign dinner with a vegetarian group.
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Some of those images have hurt Kucinich, political observers say.
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“In general, I think he’s among the best-loved of all the candidates, yet he is among those who they are least likely to caucus for. That’s kind of a conundrum,” said David Loebsack, a Democratic activist and political science professor at Cornell College.
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Loebsack, who just recently decided to support Howard Dean of Vermont, said his fellow activists may respond to Kucinich with their hearts, but their heads tell them to nominate someone who can win the general election.
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“I think he says all the right things for a lot of the groups that matter, especially labor and peace activists, but clearly there are not enough folks at the moment who are willing to caucus for him,” Loebsack said.
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While Dean likes to say he’s from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, Kucinich argues that he’s the rightful tenant of that turf. Instead of merely opposing the war in Iraq, Kucinich says he’d cut the Pentagon budget 15 percent and establish a Department of Peace. While many candidates call for expanding access to health care, Kucinich pushes for a government-run, single-payer system that his opponents say can’t pass Congress.
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While all candidates talk about improving trade and workers’ rights around the globe, Kucinich pledges to scrap the World Trade Organization and NAFTA.
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Marybeth Gardam, Iowa coordinator of the Stop the Arms Race political action committee, or STAR PAC, says personally favors Kucinich. And on Tuesday, her organization gave him its endorsement. She said while she shared qualms about Kucinich’s electability a few months ago, she said, “I think I’ve come to feel more that what will defeat Bush is a candidate who sets himself apart and that distinguishes himself by taking a really different and courageous point of view. He is the one that’s doing that,” she said.
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Even some members of the Iowa Green Party, who are not generally known for their pragmatism, say Kucinich is a bad bet. “I think Kucinich is attractive to some progressive voters; however, a lot of us concluded a long time ago that Kucinich doesn’t stand a chance of receiving the Democratic Party nomination,” David Larson, a Green Party spokesman from Waterloo, said. “It’s not going to happen, so why bother.”
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Kucinich, munching a tofu and rice-paper roll at a Thai restaurant in Des Moines, turns questions about his electability into a joke about his height. “As far as this height thing, you know, don’t tell anybody this, all right, but I’m going to buy some platform shoes and I’m going to become very tall, very soon. And that’s my ticket,” he said.
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Besides, Kucinich has often noted that he has a history of beating the odds. The son of a transient truck driver and the eldest of seven children, Kucinich says he lived in 21 different places by the time he moved out of the house at age 17.
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“Growing up in a large family, there was so much chaos — my mom and dad loved each other very much, but they had a rough life,” he said. “When I finally moved, by the time I was a senior in high school I moved to get out and get an apartment of my own, it took me two years to get used to the quiet.”
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Politics was not much of a topic at a dinner table where late arrivals often went hungry. Instead, Kucinich caught the political bug watching John F. Kennedy, a fellow Catholic, take the oath of office to assume the presidency. “When he said, ‘Let the word go forth from this time and place that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,’ I mean, he was talking about his peers. I thought he was talking about me,’“ he said.
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After working two full-time jobs as a surgical technician and a newspaper copy boy for two years to save money for college, Kucinich started at Cleveland State University in 1966. As a freshman, he decided to run for city council.
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“For a brief period of time, I had my schedule arranged so I was actually taking classes while I was working two jobs,” he said. “That was probably a period of my life that not only was I burning the candle at both ends but I kind of cut the candle in half and had four flames going.”
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At age 31, Kucinich became the nation’s youngest major metropolitan mayor in 1977. Two years later, he lost re-election after the city defaulted on bank loans as a result of his refusal to sell the municipal power company.
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On the campaign trail, he talks often of his political resurrection: Campaigning with a light bulb as a symbol for the fact that his decision had saved Cleveland residents hundreds of millions of dollars on their power bills, he won a state Senate seat in 1994 and was elected to Congress two years later.
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Now, he says, his candidacy “is a test of how much people want their country back.”He argues that it is meaningless for Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman to call himself a liberal and Dean to call himself a moderate if both candidates have identical positions on maintaining Pentagon spending, supporting capital punishment and keeping international trade agreements.
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As his cell phone begins to chime the opening bars of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” Kucinich says he’s the only candidate who provides voters a real choice. “My candidacy ensures a big turnout — for both sides,” he said. “People will be able to choose what kind of country they really want.”