Sometimes you find that a politician really will speak his mind when asked. Even more rare is one who will speak his mind when not asked. Dennis Kucinich is one of those rare breed of politicians who’s willing to do both. More importantly he’s willing to speak out against other factions of the Democratic Party, not to pander to progressives or the netroots, but because he is a progressive, and he opposes those who would use the Democratic Party as just another empty vessel to fill with corporate cash and neocon dreams:
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, a consistent opponent of the war in Iraq, appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week, telling host George Stephanopoulos, “I think that the support is building in my direction.”
Stephanopoulos suggested instead that the response to Kucinich merely represents the Democratic Party’s “liberal base” and that the “centrists” of the Democratic Leadership Council under Howard Ford believe that Kucinich’s ideas “could hurt the party.”
Stephanopoulos quoted Ford as saying, “‘George W. Bush is handing us Democrats our Hoover moment'” and told Kucinich, “They believe that if the party follows your path, they’re going to blow this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“You have to keep in mind that the center has shifted in our politics,” Kucinich responded, smiling. “I’m really at the center, and all the other candidates are to the right of me. And they’re to the right of the American people.”
“The Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda is indistinguishable from the Republican Neoconservative agenda,” he went on. “They want to continue to stay in Iraq. They reject the idea of a not-for-profit health care system. … These analysts are … trying to keep a politics that really helps support a privileged few at the expense of the many. So I’m the candidate of the people.”
(cont.)
Here’s you’re soundbite people: The Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda is indistinguishable from the Republican Neoconservative agenda. That is the best summation of the DLC and its insidious influence over the last two decades on our politics. They threw away the ideals on which FDR won victories during the last “Hoover moment” in our history, and substituted warmed over Republican policies cloaked in rhetoric which was marginally more compassionate sounding than the that which came out of the mouth of Newt “I divorced my wife while she was fighting cancer” Gingrich. And the worst thing was that Gringrich, Delay, et alia, would have failed to pass the GOP’s legislative agenda of corporate welfare and drowning the federal government without the DLC’s active connivance and assistance.
With Bill Clinton they were able to sell this as the only viable approach to winning elections, despite the losses the Dems continued to suffer everywhere but at the level of Presidential elections. Once Bill’s second term was up, however, they have done nothing but enable the worst policies of the worst President in our history, while shackling Democratic candidates with their mealy mouthed centrist claptrap.
And why? Because they are willing captives of the K Street regime of corporate lobbyists. They sold the American people down the river for corporate handouts. We have an incredible shrinking middle class, more people without health care than many developing nations, much less developed ones, bloated trade and governmental deficits, a ruined Army and Marine Corps, a great vacuum machine sucking away jobs overseas, the lowest tax rates for billionaires and corporations in our history, more people in prison their ever before and little regard for anyone with an income below 6 digits.
This is the legacy of the DLC folks. Dennis Kucinich is right. They should be sent packing to join their neocon friends in the GOP. The sooner the Democrats realize this, the better they and the country will be. If they fail to heed his advice to turn away from “triangulation” and promote real progressive policies in the next election, the Democrats may just go the way of the Dodo bird.
“not-for-profit healthcare system”. Much better than universal healthcare or single-payer. Those could be components or the structure of a not-for-profit system. But not-for-profit…awesome…why should a corporation make a profit off of your illness or misfortune…
close enough for government work…
© donwright clik to enlarge
lTMF’sA
…If they fail to heed his advice to turn away from “triangulation” and promote real progressive policies in the next election, the Democrats may just go the way of the Dodo bird.
As in evolution, what isn’t needed withers away.
“The Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda is indistinguishable from the Republican Neoconservative agenda.”
The simple reason why Hillary must be defeated in the primaries, and hopefully defeated in the election if she is nominated. That sounds harsh, but there is no question that Hillary is not a progressive-liberal. She is into careerism pure and simple like most snob school graduates.
It was the night of the Logo forum that I realized I will be forever out of step with the American political mainstream.
The only candidate who spoke to me during the entire two hours was Dennis Kucinich. He appears to be the only candidate I can support without reservation.
So, during the primaries at least, I intend to vote my hopes. My vote, my contribution, my time and energy will go to Kucinich for as long as he’s in the race. After that, I sit on my hands ’til November.
The “American political mainstream” you speak of is an artificial construct of the corporate media.
If you consider the real political mainstream, Kucinich is the only one in the current crop of candidates who belongs to it. That is why the RNC-DNC/DLC-corporate media must defeat his candidacy at all costs.
Survey of Public Attitudes Makes Kucinich the Runaway Leader on the Issues
Two things above all infuriate me at the moment. The first is that the Democrats enable Bush now that they control Congress no less than they enabled him before they controlled it.
The second is that there is only one progressive candidate in this election cycle—Kucinich—and yet most of the progressive blogosphere treats him with nothing but condescension and contempt.
Clearly, this is a sign that the blogosphere is not yet mature: it still gets too many of its presuppositions and attitudes from the corporate media, which of course frame everything for the benefit of corporations. The corporate media are doing to Kucinich what they did to Gore in 2000, and it is working—even on the netroots.
He’s not part of the club.
The country has changed a lot since 2004. Therefore, I think that progressives would make a tragic, profound error if they wrote Kucinich off as being no more “electable” in 2008 than in 2004.
But that is exactly what seems to have happened. Most of the netroots have assimilated the corporate media’s meme that the choice for Dems is between the current top three candidates in the polls and in fundrasing.
you need to take a little deeper look into Kucinich. I do not want Dennis Kucinich to be the nominee of the Democratic Party and it zero to do with his positions on the issues. It has to do with Dennis…his sanity…his job performance…his ability to carry our banner forward and win.
In fact, I’m torn about him even being in the race precisely because I DO agree with him on most things. Why?
Would you want to go to court with a clown as your attorney? It wouldn’t matter if he made a good argument in your defense if the jury couldn’t get past the big red nose and giant feet.
I don’t want Dennis Kucinich representing me or my values to anyone. But, at the same time, I’m glad that someone is saying these things.
Your animosity toward Kucinich seems to be based on two issues: 1) “his sanity…his job performance”; 2) his appearance.
With regard to (2), perhaps you underestimate the intelligence of the American people? Perhaps they will be able to listen to what a candidate is saying even though he does not have the looks of a Warren Beatty? Shrub was able to capture the White House even though he comes across as a (malevolent) clown much more than Kucinich does. That suggests to me that Kucinich’s being a “clown” is not so much an objective fact as it is the image the corporate media has constructed of him.
As regards (1), all you are presenting is hearsay. Can you provide links to articles or profiles which document his insanity and dismal job performance? I only recall reading one profile of him (in 2003), and it raised doubts neither about his sanity nor his competence.
Well chemtrails did become a bit of an embarrassment for him when he started contemplating his presidential bid. As did his pro-life views.
His wife-shopping tour was kind of grotesque and, yes, he looks like a Keebler elf on top of the rest of it.
Thanks for your response, Boo. All the chemtrails affairs shows, as far as I can tell, is that Kucinich is not a saint, but a Congressman and Washington politician, after all. And to write him off merely because he used to be “pro-life” would be to behave like the fudies, who never trusted Bush 1 because he used to be pro-choice.
I guess the wife-shopping affair was “kind of grotesque”, but I’m not sure if it says more about his political qualifications than Bill’s dalliances with Monica.
You’ve made you point that Kucinich is a bit goofy, but I never claimed that he is a paragon of gravity. I don’t think you’ve backed up your rather sensationalist denunciations of him.
I think that part of what’s going on here is that there is such a mystique surrounding the presidency—leader of the free world, finger on the nuclear trigger etc.—that we desire candidates to have near-superhuman stature. It is hard to imagine Americans taking a candidate like Nicholas Sarkozy seriously, whose wife publicly betrayed him with another man not too long ago.
Why can’t you treat Kucinich as you do other candidates? In one diary, you wrote something along the lines of that the staff and advisers that a candidate assembles are about as significant an indication of a candidate’s quality as the candidate himself. (I admit I know nothing about Kucinich’s staff or advisers.)
My view remains that the benefits for progressive politics of having a real progressive as the Dem candidate in an election in which the Rethugs are in the worst position that they have been in since Watergate outweigh the risks associated with the perception that he lacks gravitas.
But it does matter that he’s goofy, just as it matters that Al Sharpton was involved in the Tawana Brawley incident and that Teddy Kennedy was involved in the Chappaquidick incident…
Sharpton is funny and Sharpton is very smart and Sharpton is media savvy, but he is a horrible advocate for the black community and for the progressive movement. We’re worse off every time he gets in front of a camera, which is roughly three times a day.
Do you not see that it is not an unambiguously good thing to have a 90% pro-life until 2003, chemtrail conspiracy theorist, cooking making elf as the vehicle for our aspirations?
I do see that all of those are unambiguously bad things. (I glanced over that chemtrail thing quickly, so I didn’t realize it was a conspiracy theory.)
But I still think that all those bad things are outweighed by the good things a Kucinich candidacy would bring: speaking the truth about the war, the military-industrial complex, for-profit health insurance, and so on.
The educational experience that would come from Kucinich being the nominee would be worth it, even if he loses, in my opinion. It would amount to a revolution in American politics. It would show the masses that progressive politics are possible as a mainstream phenomenon in this country, invigorating them to participate actively in future elections and in organizing.
There is no doubt in my mind that Kucinich being the nominee and losing would be better for the future of progressive politics in America than Clinton or Obama being the nominee and winning. (In Clinton’s case, she would probably lose, just as the past two (non-progressive) Dem nominees have lost.)
The last progressive the Dems had as nominee was McGovern. He was routed by Nixon, and Dems have thought that they should not put progressives forward ever since. But that was at the end of the sixties, when the political center was starting to shift right in America. But we are now in the opposite situation, with the center shifting to the left. Therefore, the defeat of a progressive presidential candidate today would not have the same consequences as it did then.
Can’t you see? The way to undo the stranglehold of corporations, the super-rich, and the military-industrial complex over American politics and reclaim the Democratic Party isn’t to put a Hillary Clinton into the White House. It is to get the Dem Party to put forward progressive nominees for president, even if they lose at first.
Hillary as president would do us little if any good. She has already made it clear that she would undo few if any of the disastrous changes that Bush has wrought.
I agree that now would be a perfect time in history for a truly progressive candidate. But Kucinich is no Teddy Roosevelt. I can say it fifteen different ways but it comes down to a simple fact: I wouldn’t hire the guy to represent me in any capacity so there is no chance that I’ll vote for him to run this country. It’s a simple standard.
And if you care at all about this country you cannot think that we’ll be better off losing this presidential election to likes of Romney, Thompson, or Guiliani. That’s borderline insane.
The court is 5-4. Look at the DOJ. I mean, be serious Alexander.
I agree that Romney, Thompson, or Guiliani would be significantly worse than Hillary. But they are the worse case scenario. We don’t know if it will come to that. Also, it is still unknown what if any effect Mike Bloomberg will have on the election.
I still think that it is way too early in this election for progressives not to give Kucinich the time of day, even if one doesn’t embrace the strategy I proposed of fielding him even if he stands a good chance of losing.
The way I would like to see the race framed by progressives isn’t—which of the top three, Hillary, Obama, and Edwards, should we support—but: which of the two most progressive candidates—Edwards and Kucinich—should we support? I would be happy with Edwards getting the nomination. He does not pander as much to what the corporate media calls “the mainstream” as the other two.
Well I don’t care who you support, you’re welcome to make the case for or against any candidate.
I frankly can’t do much to effect the outcome of the presidential race. I would vastly prefer Dodd, Edwards, or Obama to Clinton. Richardson would be okay, but I have a lot of issues with Richardson.
I’m fine with Kucinich and Gravel stirring the pot on certain issues, and I do expect Kucinich to do surprisingly well (which means getting over 5%) in some places.
But if we wanted a real progressive in this race we needed Russ Feingold to get in. Pretty much the entire netroots would have gone to war for Russ. Now it is all about local and state races.
Also, if you are in a mood for longshots, what is wrong with Dodd?
He’s got good people on his campaign, he has money, and he has experience. And he’s close to the most liberal member of the Senate.
I forgot about Dodd. I guess what made me stop thinking about him is that he expressed remarks dismissive of impeachment.
Yes, it would have been nice if Feingold were running. Why is it that I suspect that he was told not to by the Dem leadership? He was probably told in advance that he would get absolutely no support from the Party. Only progressive presidential candidates who don’t stand a chance are allowed.
Perhaps I was caught up in enthusiasm by seeing a front-page diary about Kucinich. But I think the main point I was trying to get across is sound: there is no reason for the netroots to trash Kucinich. The corporate media will take care of that; they don’t need our help.
I guess I have this idea that squabbling within the Dem Party can be a good thing, but progressive Dems eating their own should be avoided, if possible. We can learn something from Reagan, when he said, “Never speak ill of another Republican.”
Kucinich leaves me cold. Very cold. Until I started watching the debates, I was glad taht he was in the race, but he panders heavily to whatever audience he is in front of. He seemed so smarmy to me at the Human Rights Campaign Debate.
He might have a lot of interesting positions but it is very hard to take him seriously. The only function I see him serving is to make the other candidates appear more conservative in contrast.
He isn’t seriously running for president given his low number of trips to New Hampshire and Iowa and he did a poor job as mayor.
He basically used to his last campaign to get a wife, that is good for him, but what does he want now?
he panders heavily to whatever audience he is in front of.
What an awful and unheard-of trait in a politician! Clearly, that should disqualify him right there and then.
It’s a good thing that our DLC-approved candidate Hillary never panders to her audiences.
Why is it hard to take him seriously? Lots of people are taking him seriously, on this thread, for example.
You have produced not a single fact nor argument, but are merely echoing the conventional wisdom generated by the corporate media.
I thought his appearance on Stephanobrains show right before the last election was brilliant. But still, there were many others saying the same thing. Cheney, Obama, every Progressive in America.
I like Kucinich a helluva lot. But he doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell of getting nominated.
Get a radio show or become an analyst.
it’s a cruel joke, huh, for the only ‘unelectable’ candidate to have the most notional support from the national mood.
an interestingly accurate reflection of the state of american politics.
still, i guess we should be grateful anyone at all is saying what needs to be said.
….while waiting for circumstances to awaken the body politic pay attention to issues and platforms over hate ads and kult o’ personality.
I find your arguments against Kucinich extremely specious Booman. They sound like markos leftover infantile “ugh” statements. It’s fine if you can lay out policy decisions you disagree with or his history in Ohio, but calling him a keebler elf is not the stuff of a decent argument — unless you’re prepared to go with the MSM critique style: shallow over substance.
Have you called Hillary a “shrew” or Edwards a “smiling bobblehead” or “Obama” an “oreo”? That’s just as substantitive as your appearance attack on Kucinich — and it reveals the same ol’ American Idol paradigm thinking that lets people think George Bush is some tough guy!
Kucinich is the only true progressive democratic candidate. The blogosphere has ignored the reality of his debate appearances – namely that he cleaned the floor with the others if you want to measure it by applause as happened in the AFL-CIO debate. My republican cousin actually called me to say that she loved Kucinich. She’s a hardcore rightie and not prone to loving any liberal. The union people loved Kucinich but the MSM/Daily Kos meme is this ridiculous claim that Hillary Clinton has been the winner — yes, the only candidate to be booed (boowoman?)and hissed at in every debate is somehow the clear winner.
Kucinich may not have a shot given the pathetic corporatist state we’re in, but he provides a necessary balance to force the other weak DLC puppets into action. It’s shocking that Clinton has gotten away with such smug dismissive answers to important questions. The worst? When Paul Hogarth asked her about the Telecom Act at Yearly KOs and she said, “Ask Al Gore.” That’s not a presidential answer to a valid and important question. It’s a political dodge supported by the MSM who were happy with the Telecom Act. And funny that Kucinich is the only one arguing against media consolidation.
What I think is obvious and provable, is that those damning Kucinich the loudest tend to be former Republicans-Turned-Libertarian-Democrats. They stil have their Big Daddy fantasies, clearly represented by their heroes Wenn and Tester, who have shown that what you get when you vote for former Republicans is more Republican policy.
Now that loose-cannon Paul Hackett is supporting a challenger to Kucinich, the attacks will step up. I love it when people call Kucinich “crazy” but borderline sociopaths like Hackett are trumpeted.
The marginializing of Kucinich is proof that the so-caled progressive blogosphere has become as co-opted as the MSM. So it goes.
Great diary, Steven. Onward.
I agree with Kucinich at about the same rate I agreed with Al Sharpton in 2004. What does that mean? It means that I agree with probably 90% of what Kucinich says.
I never for a moment thought Al Sharpton should be our nominee, let alone the president. The same holds for Kucinich.
As for Clinton on ‘ask Al Gore’ I wrote about it, I was in the room, and I ripped her for it. I never said she won any debate.
Finally, Chris Dodd is a progressive candidate.
uh, make that WEBB and Tester. Not enough coffee yet.
Disagreeing with someone else’s opinion isn’t the same as getting co-opted.
Regardless of all the comments here, I’ll bet we all know that Dennis has no chance to get the Democratic nomination for President. Be that as it may, Dennis does understand the true heart of politics….namely that politics has to be about experience. When Kucinich stated that he had found the love of his life in his new wife, he then said he could not imagine not being allowed to get married to her. How can we deny that experience to other Americans regardless of sexual orientation? When we speak about policy that way, we humanize it and thus humanize those different from us because we all love someone.