Muslims For Kucinich

The oldest of seven children, Dennis Kucinich was born in Ohio, on October 8, 1946 near Cleveland’s West Side, an area dotted by gritty ethnic neighborhoods and blue-collar suburbs. His Croatian father, Frank Kucinich, drove a delivery truck; his Irish mother, Virginia, cared for the children. Like many other working class people in the city, Kucinich’s family lived through austere, difficult times. With his father’s meager income as the only means of support, the family frequently couldn’t pay rent, and Kucinich would live in 21 different places by the time he was 17.

Raised as a Roman Catholic and educated in the Cleveland public school system, the slightly-built youth showed an early appetite for competition and participated in high school football and baseball. After he graduated in 1964, Kucinich first attended Cleveland State University from 1967 to 1970, then enrolled in Case Western University, where he majored in speech and communications. He received both his bachelor and his master’s degrees in 1973.

Even before finishing college, Kucinich wasted no time pursuing a career in public service. At 21 he waged a campaign for a seat on the Cleveland City Council. Although he lost that election, two years later Kucinich ran again and was elected to the 33-member body.

He served three terms as a councilman, reveling in his self-appointed role as the champion of the “little guy.” He aggressively advanced a populist agenda and attacked initiatives he thought were in favor of special interests. He didn’t hesitate to change political alliances if he thought it would advance his own initiatives and soon acquired the reputation as a real firebrand, someone whose radical methods and barbed wit drew the ire of many of his colleagues. During the six years he served, he was called an opportunist, a demagogue and even a racist. But his attention-grabbing style and bad-boy persona, despite their effect on City Hall, won Kucinich the support of his constituency.

In 1976 Kucinich ran successfully for municipal court clerk, the second-highest elective post in Cleveland. He had served one year of his term when he announced his intention to run for mayor. Kucinich entered the 1977 race as a political maverick. State Rep. Edward Feighan had already secured the Democratic Party endorsement and Cleveland’s business and political elite in large part opposed Kucinich’s campaign.

But the 31-year-old populist wasn’t deterred. He engineered a grass-roots campaign, vowing to promote the interests of the blue-collar workers of the city and institute far-reaching reforms, from cleaning up corruption at city hall to cleaning up the sewers in depressed neighborhoods. The campaign worked; Kucinich became the youngest mayor of a major U.S. city in history.

But Kucinich faced a difficult job as Cleveland’s mayor. The city was running major deficits, almost $20 million dollars at that time, and Kucinich had inherited tens of millions of dollars in debt from his Republican predecessor, Ralph Perk. Kucinich’s confrontational political style did not help either. He antagonized many of Cleveland’s business elite and quickly found himself at odds with the Democratic-dominated city council. The hostility between established city-council representatives and Kucinich’s 20-something mayoral staff, mockingly called the “Kiddie Corps,” was deep and would occasionally devolve into personal insults and accusations.

By the spring of 1978 a coalition of critics and staunch political opponents had aligned themselves against Kucinich. The enmity betweens the two groups made governing Cleveland nearly impossible and the city’s budgetary outlook became all the more bleak. When Kucinich unceremoniously fired police chief Richard Hongisto on live television that March, his rivals used the wave of public outrage to lodge a recall campaign to remove Kucinich from office. Although the recall election failed, it marked the beginning of Kucinich’s precipitous fall from municipal grace. During the remainder of his term, Kucinich presided over a city that became known as the “Crisis Capital of the U.S.” Cleveland became the first major American city to default since the Great Depression. Its bond rating was lowered twice by Moody’s Investor Service, and the police force went on strike in response to proposed budget cuts. Not surprisingly, Kucinich lost the 1979 mayoral election.

When Kucinich left office in defeat, many observers reasonably assumed that his career in politics was over. And when in 1982 he lost the Democratic primary for Ohio Secretary of State, their evaluation indeed seemed justified.

But after four years of political exile, Kucinich returned to the political arena when Cleveland Councilman Joseph Kowalski died with two years left in his term. Kowalski represented a district with some of Kucinich’s most dedicated supporters in the mayoral election, so it was no surprise when Kucinich was elected to fill the vacancy.

The Kucinich who returned to the Cleveland City Council was not the same firebrand who had antagonized and frustrated the council as mayor. He so abandoned his confrontational style that Council President George Forbes said at the time, “He’s not the same person. He has done a good job on the council. I have a lot of respect for him.”

It was widely thought that Kucinich would easily win re-election to the City Council in 1985. Instead, he embarked on a year-long effort to become Ohio’s Governor. At first intending to challenge Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste for the party nomination, he later pledged to run as an independent. But lacking funds for his campaigns and known statewide as the mayor who led Cleveland to a default, Kucinich made little progress and withdrew altogether in August of 1986.

During the years following his abandoned gubernatorial campaign, Kucinich had little luck in politics. In 1988 and 1992 he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and lost both times. He was more successful as a businessman. In 1987 he founded K Communications, later renamed Kucinich Communications, which provided consulting services, produced industrial videos and brokered media time for its clients. In the early 1990s, Kucinich worked as the international marketing director for a start-up software business named CRC International Business Solutions, which dealt in multi-lingual accounting software.

Then in 1994 Kucinich challenged State Sen. Anthony Sinagra for his 23rd district seat. The district was composed of Cleveland neighborhoods which had historically responded positively to Kucinich’s blend of progressive populism and the election quickly became a lively and spirited race. Although he was outspent by his Republican rival 2 to 1, Kucinich emerged as the victor in the race.

One year after his return to political life Kucinich already had designs on higher office. In January 1996 he entered the Democratic primary for Ohio’s 10th District seat in the House of Representatives. Thanks to his experience as mayor and recent victory over Sinagra, Kucinich had significant name-recognition among voters, easily defeating his less well-known Democratic rivals, and went on to challenge Republican Rep. Martin Hoke in the general election.

Kucinich faced a difficult campaign running against the two-term representative. He once again relied on a grassroots campaign with ties to lower- and middle-class communities. And he received decisive support from environmental groups and labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, which poured more than $1million into ads attacking Hoke. After a bitter battle Kucinich managed to defeat Hoke by 3 percent of the vote.

Since then, Kucinich has revived his role as champion of the “little guy.” In his first term he emerged as a vocal critic of NAFTA. He has also opposed cuts in Social Security and healthcare and advocated for a patients bill of rights that would allow all patients their choice of doctors and specialists.

While this populist platform has secured him the support of his lower-income constituency at home in Cleveland, nationally Kucinich is best known for his consistent opposition to U.S. military action abroad. He has long advocated the creation of a Department of Peace, through which “non-violence would become an organizing principle in our society.” During the congressional debates about the use of force to establish peace in war-torn Kosovo, Kucinich pleaded with colleagues not to sanction a NATO bombing campaign that would exacerbate the existing human suffering. In a New York Times commentary published in April 1999, he wrote, “We must demonstrate that we know the difference between a legal and just humanitarian intervention on behalf of a civilian population and an illegal and unjust military intervention against civilians. Otherwise, we will have bombed the village in order to save it, and created a war in the name of ending one.”

On February 17, 2002, Kucinich expressed his pacifism in his “Prayer for America,” delivered to a group of Democrats in California. The speech, which came shortly after President Bush used the phrase “Axis of Evil” in the State of the Union address, protested the war in Afghanistan and warned that the U.S. was on the verge of becoming a “permanent war economy.” Within weeks of the address, supporters had organized a “Draft Kucinich” campaign calling on him to run for president in 2004.

Although Kucinich is far from a leading contender in the race, a number of his initiatives may attract significant segments of the voting public. As a vocal critic of military intervention in Iraq, Kucinich could draw considerable support from anti-war voters. He favors preservation of Social Security in its current form and increased funding for U.S. healthcare. In addition his pledge to create a pro-labor “worker’s White House” and withdraw the U.S. from NAFTA could win him some labor union support.

But Kucinich’s weaknesses as a candidate may offset these advantages. He suffers from a serious lack of national name identification with voters, and has not been a prolific fundraiser. At the end of the 2002 election, his campaign committee had $7,300 in the bank and debts of $7,890.