At 81, she isn't giving up or in
What a great article. Midge Miller expresses my feelings perfectly. Originally published in the Star Tribune
At 81, she isn't giving up or in
Eric Black, Star Tribune
Published February 17, 2004
MADISON, WIS. -- Midge Miller, 81, promises her 28 children, stepchildren and grandchildren that she refuses to die until she can get them a decent president.
Since she is backing Rep. Dennis Kucinich this year, and she has backed losing candidates in pretty much every election since 1968, one of her sons has begun joking that he's going to have to assassinate her to get rid of her.
Please don't take offense. Miller obviously doesn't, as she merrily relates her son's wisecrack. Although she is twice widowed, has cancer, and prefers a candidate who is polling at two percent in Wisconsin going into today's primary, this perpetual liberal activist is upbeat and indefatigable.
This isn't true of all Kucinich supporters. Many are angry at the political elite and the establishment media for dismissing Kucinich's ideas and his candidacy on the grounds that he is unelectable because he's part of the so-called "loony left." A cartoon in the current New Yorker magazine shows poll results from Mars. Kucinich is at 93 percent.
Miller laughs at that, too. While acknowledging a reasonable possibility that Kucinich will not become the 44th president of the United States, she is also unconflicted about her decision to back the Ohio congressman who never stops reminding audiences that he is the only candidate in the presidential race who voted against the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, NAFTA and free trade with China, whose platform includes the creation of a non-profit single-payer health system that would cover every American, and the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace.
Madison is a liberal bastion and Kucinich draws overflow crowds at two events Monday. To riotous applause, he calls for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, "and then we work with the nations of the world to do away with war itself."
"I would like him to be president," Miller says of the candidate who hugged her on his way into one Madison rally, kissed her on the way out and in between thanked her publicly for her support and encouragement.
"At the moment, unless everyone else drops out of the race, it doesn't look like he will [win]. But not a minute that I've spent working for him has been wasted. Politics is about more than winning elections. It's about changing the world and making it better. Dennis has already done that by the effect he's had on the other candidates."
She believes that Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards and Gov. Howard Dean have moved in Kucinich's direction on issues of trade, health care and jobs. "He even has Bush trying harder to get the U.N. more involved in Iraq," she says.
Miller is neither a recent convert to progressive, peacenik politics, nor an amateur activist. She was a long-time Wisconsin legislator and Democratic National Committeewoman. Some Kucinich supporters may bolt the party or drop out of political activity completely when the party nominates someone else. Not Miller. She will close ranks behind the nominee.
Like many Democrats, she has thought about abandoning her first choice on grounds of electability. But whenever she does, she thinks about Kucinich's platform and stays on board.
After confessing to these flirtations with apostasy, she attends the Kucinich events Monday with gusto. When Kucinich describes how he will pay for the single payer health plan with money cut from military spending, when he frames the campaign as an argument about what kind of country we are going to be -- a military empire or a cooperative member of the family of nations? -- and when he brings a student union audience to its feet urging them to use his candidacy to "tap our potential to evolve into something better," she leans over to her seatmate and asks, "Now do you see why I can't switch to someone else?"
Miller came into politics nine presidential elections ago through Sen. Eugene McCarthy's 1968 anti-Vietnam War presidential campaign in Wisconsin. She was one of the founders of the Women's Political Caucus.
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