Kucinich's message of peace draws young volunteers
Originally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Kucinich's message of peace draws young volunteers
01/26/04
Elizabeth Auster
Plain Dealer Reporter
Manchester, N.H.
Sometimes Chris Ortman wonders how he ended up here.
He has never liked cold weather. Yet here he is, in a brand-new pair of long johns, living in a state where the temperature once again was below zero Sunday morning.
He never set out to work in politics, let alone a presidential campaign. Yet here he is, working seven days a week, 15 hours a day, for Cleveland Democratic U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a politician he hadn't even heard of a year ago.
Walking Sunday from Kucinich headquarters to a nearby cafe, Ortman, a 23-year-old graduate of Xavier University, shook his head.
"When I got here, the wind chill was 50 below zero," said Ortman, who was raised in Omaha, Neb. "I said, 'What did I do to deserve this?' "
But as he settled into a chair at the cafe, taking a rare break from his job as an office administrator at Kucinich's headquarters, Ortman slowly answered his own question - explaining why he and many Kucinich aides find themselves devoting most of their waking hours to a campaign that most experts believe will go nowhere, at least in conventional terms.
Part of the answer, he said, is that he believes Kucinich's campaign embodies something that is enormously important, but often overlooked in U.S. media coverage - a budding peace movement here and abroad. Ortman is interested enough in the subject of peace that he minored in peace studies at Xavier.
Ortman said the first he heard of Kucinich was when a former Nicaraguan official last year shocked him by naming Kucinich, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as two of the most inspiring leaders the United States has produced.
That led Ortman to check out Kucinich's Web site, where he discovered he heartily agreed with various Kucinich positions, including his stances on trade, health care and gay marriage. And that led him last summer to sign up for the campaign's internship program, which pays a stipend and provides housing.
Ortman doesn't pretend he was happy with Kucinich's 1 percent showing in Iowa last week, but he said he wasn't surprised either. For him and many of the people working for Kucinich, he said, winning caucuses and primaries is less important than spreading Kucinich's message to the largest possible audience.
"We're up against a big powerful beast. But it's not hopeless," he said.
Ortman's attitude is common among Kucinich's campaign staff, said Benjamin Eichert, Kucinich's New England youth coordinator.
"The people that are part of this campaign were drawn by the concept of changing the world. It's not about Dennis," Eichert said. "We're here to achieve something greater than one person being elected to one office. And I think we're advancing toward that goal."
Standing in a hallway outside Kucinich's busy second-floor headquarters in a downtown office building Sunday, Eichert pointed proudly to a headline in New Hampshire's largest newspaper about Kucinich placing second to John Kerry in a mock presidential election at a forum of high school students here Saturday.
He pointed also to a new campaign sign that Howard Dean's campaign has been using. Its slogan: "Hope Not Fear: Vote Dean." That language, he said came directly from Kucinich's earlier campaign theme: "Fear Ends. Hope Begins."
Eichert said he measures success partly by how often other candidates have been belatedly embracing Kucinich's themes - from his fierce opposition to free-trade agreements to the importance of internationalizing the peacekeeping force in Iraq.
When he signed up with Kucinich, Eichert said, he gave no thought to which Democrat had the best chance of winning.
"If I'm going to be involved in electoral politics," said Eichert, who has started a documentary film company and worked as a distribution manager for an independent record label, "I'm going to be involved with someone that truly fights for what I believe in. I'm not here because I want to be in the White House and sleep in some bedroom."
Dot Mather [ed. note: most sources give her name as "Maver" not "Mather"], Kucinich's national campaign manager, points out that the last election she was involved in was when she ran for president of her high school student council in East Brunswick, N.J., decades ago.
"People in the Kucinich campaign, for the most part, have not been involved in politics before," Mather said Sunday.
Mather, who lives in Vermont and runs a transformational kinesiology practice - a form of healing art - said she never expected "in a million years" to be running a presidential campaign.
She was drawn to Kucinich, she said, after being impressed by his speech at a conference on children's issues in the fall of 2002. While she insists that Kucinich has no plans of leaving the race if he does poorly on Tuesday, she concedes she has a somewhat different perspective on the challenge of winning votes.
"I don't look for results," she said. "I absolutely know that so long as we can get Dennis out in front of the people and have people meet him, we're going all the way. If I were looking at results I would have questioned our viability a long time ago."
Asked if she is discouraged by Kucinich's performance so far, she smiles serenely. "Discouragement," she said, "is not part of my vocabulary."
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