Kucinich wants peace to be priority
Originally published in the Fresno Bee
Kucinich wants peace to be priority
Ohio Democrat proposes sweeping national changes.
By David Whitney
Bee Washington Bureau
(Published Sunday, November 23, 2003, 5:47 AM)
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Dennis Kucinich was expounding on his proposals for a hasty exit from Iraq and a 15% cut in defense spending when a member of Central Ohioans for Peace asked about something far deeper.
With the 57-year-old Cleveland congressman headed for a fund-raiser sponsored by the Natural Law Party, which espouses the pantheistic message of oneness and unity, the skeptical peace activist asked, "I wonder if you feel sure of the dangers others see in aligning yourself with them?"
Kucinich answered by asking everyone to take a dollar bill out of their pocket and to look closely at the eye at the apex of the pyramid on the Great Seal.
"Here on the Great Seal of the United States we see an expression of spiritual principles," Kucinich said. "So I think what we are here to do is bring spiritual principles into the material world."
Kucinich, running last in most polling on the nine Democrats seeking the nomination to take on President Bush next November, may also be the quirkiest and least understood.
His hair typically is mussed. He appears to be swimming in his suits, perhaps because his vegan diet keeps him rail thin. And his ears seem a bit too large for his boyish face. It is hardly the look of political polish that personal wealth has bought some of the other contenders for the seat he seeks.
He is also on the left of mainstream.
He has a plan that could bring the troops home by New Year's if he were president. He has introduced legislation to repeal the Patriot Act.
He also would repeal tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for a free college education for everyone. As his first act in office, he said, he would abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement and get the United States out of the World Trade Organization.
"I've been all over the country and seen grass growing in what used to be parking lots of major industries that made steel and bicycles and washing machines," he told an Ohio State University assembly.
Kucinich said he would sign treaties banning chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and would create a Department of Peace with a Cabinet-level secretary devoted to resolving conflicts at home and abroad.
"As president of the United States, I would lead the nation in rejoining the world," Kucinich said. He described his campaign as "a movement of empowerment."
"I have a holistic vision where no nation dominates another, where we live cooperatively," he said.
Few people, even in his own town and state, think Kucinich has a shot at the White House. Polls show him with between 1% and 3% of the vote.
And yet Kucinich trudges on, feeling ignored by the media but supremely confident that the clarity of his progressive message will get out and ultimately sweep him into office.
"As we get closer to the election, and as people learn about the campaign, it is inevitable that our campaign starts to rise because I think people continue to look for alternatives," Kucinich said.
Kucinich is a self-made politician of a different order.
The oldest of seven children whose truck-driving father never had much money, Kucinich likes to tell people that he lived in 21 apartments and "a few cars" during his childhood. That endowed him with a tenacity and drive. He put himself through college and was elected to the Cleveland City Council shortly thereafter.
Kucinich was 31 when voters elevated him to the mayor's office in 1977. The city was in deep financial trouble, and when he refused to sell the municipal power plant as the banks had demanded, they foreclosed, the city went into bankruptcy and by 1979 Kucinich was disgraced and unemployed.
That began his search for meaning and purpose. Campaign communications adviser Dale Butland described it as Kucinich's "40 days in the wilderness," even though the congressman said he wandered about the country nearly four years.
It is on that journey that Kucinich met actress Shirley MacLaine and other spiritualists, vegans and New Age crusaders who remain among his core supporters.
By the early 1990s, Kucinich was ready to re-enter politics. By then the wisdom of preserving public ownership of the local power company had been revived. Instead of being viewed as the mayor who brought the city to financial ruin, Kucinich now was regarded as the person who kept low-cost power available to the townsfolk.
After two years in the state Senate, Kucinich was elected to Congress.
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