Titanic Tuesday: campaigns sink or swim
The City Newspaper - Rochester, NY reports on local support for various candidates, including Muslim American Tayyab Siddiqui, a Kucinich volunteer. Read on:
Among the candidates with a local presence, the real dark horse is US Representative Dennis Kucinich.
The Ohio Democrat has been in politics almost his entire adult life: He was elected mayor of Cleveland at age 31, stirred things up as a working-class-oriented populist (most notably in his refusal to sell Cleveland's municipally-owned electric utility), lost a bid for re-election, and years later staged a comeback and won a seat on Congress.
Kucinich's platform is solidly social-democratic, and he's explicitly running as a peace candidate. He supports single-payer universal health insurance and opposes the privatization of Social Security; proposes a 15 percent cut in military spending and a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq (he voted against the Iraq war and the subsequent USA PATRIOT Act); promises to nix NAFTA and withdraw from the World Trade Organization; supports gay marriage, not just civil unions; supports raising the minimum wage to around $8.50 (the same level in real dollars as in 1968).
Shortsville resident Brian Cummings is heading the regional campaign. Cummings essentially believes the truth will win out. "Of the people who've heard of Kucinich," he says, "nobody doesn't like him; they just raise the electability issue." He notes that musicians Willie Nelson and the Buffalo-based Ani DiFranco have endorsed Kucinich. (Said DiFranco recently: "He's not a self-aggrandizing strategist or corporate whore, he's the real thing.")
Kucinich's foreign policy agenda "plays well" with voters, says Cummings. He points to something Kucinich already has done to help the Rochester-Finger Lakes area: that is, sponsoring the Veterans' Millennium Health Care Act, which helped keep institutions like the Canandaigua VA hospital open.
The campaign has attracted a diverse group of volunteers. For example, Tayyab Siddiqui, a 30-year-old computer programmer originally from Pakistan, says his own "strong political views" drew him to Kucinich. "I have zero background" in politics, Siddiqui says.
"The bad economy is having an effect on me, my not being able to find work," says Siddiqui, who came here to join family after working in Minnesota for two years. He puts much hope in Kucinich's plan for extending the New Deal with public works projects: rebuilding the nation's schools and infrastructure. The plan is designed to provide two million jobs.
County Legislator Bill Benet is involved in the Kucinich campaign, as well. He sums up his feelings in an official endorsement: "I've been in politics 31 years, and I've liked some candidates enough to campaign for them. Paul Simon in 1992 comes to mind. But Dennis is the best progressive candidate in all the time I've been at this."
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