Whatever Dennis Kucinich’s merits, and he has quite a few, he is a spectacularly tone-deaf politician. First of all, let me stipulate that it’s completely idiotic and irresponsible to put unpitted olives on someone’s sandwich. You chomp down on a pit that you weren’t expecting, and dental damage is an obvious result. Anyone would be entitled to compensation…not just the cost of the sandwich, but the cost of any dental work or oral surgery that was required as a result. But Kucinich wants $150,000.
“Said sandwich wrap was unwholesome and unfit for human consumption in that it was presented to contain pitted olives, yet unknown to plaintiff, contained an unpitted olive or olives which plaintiff did not reasonably expect to be in the food prepared for him, and could not visually detect prior to consumption,” the lawsuit said.
He’s suing four contractors for the House of Representatives’ cafeteria for $150,000.
Biting into it caused serious “permanent dental and oral injuries requiring multiple surgical and dental procedures,” the legal documents say. They contend the congressman is entitled to damages for future dental and medical expenses and to compensate him for pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment.
Again, it’s established law that a victim can get compensation for pain incurred and permanent loss of enjoyment. If you hurt someone and screw up their life, you have to compensate them for that. That’s fair. But Kucinich is a politician. He has to know that suing the House cafeteria for the pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment caused by an unpitted olive in his sandwich wrap is one of the best arguments for tort reform ever presented on a platter to the Republicans. Obviously, he sued prior to the president showing a willingness to discuss tort reform in the State of the Union speech, but doesn’t he ever consider how he might make himself look ridiculous and undermine the rights of more deserving people if he sues for $150,000 to compensate him for a catering mistake?
But, who am I kidding? He’s Dennis Kucinich, the worst salesman for progressive politics I’ve ever seen. I wish we had progressives who looked and acted like Mark Warner or Jeff Bingaman. I want progressives who look and act like they belong in power. I don’t need yapping dogs like Anthony Weiner, or clowns like Alan Grayson. They create a parody of progressivism. He’s getting old, but John Conyers knows how to act. He has some sense of decorum. And he’d know better than to sue the House cafeteria for loss of enjoyment.
When Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders scored a touchdown, he didn’t spike the ball. He handed it to the ref. His reasoning? You should act like you’ve been there before. That’s what progressives need to do. Act like you belong, not like the left-wing mirror image of Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes. That’s what Ronald Reagan figured out. He took that Goldwater bullshit and acted like any idiot would agree with it. He had confidence. He didn’t make a laughing stock out of himself or the issues that he cared about.
I am tired of having weenies, fools, purists, and amateurs for allies. Act like you belong in power. Don’t try to turn the sins of an idiotic sandwich-maker into a financial windfall for yourself.
I wish we had progressives who looked and acted like Mark Warner or Jeff Bingaman.
Mark Warner? Seriously? I can’t say anything about Bingaman because I don’t know if anyone has ever heard him say a word. He’s never on the Sunday bobblehead shows. Has he ever been on Tweety’s afternoon shoutfest?
Aside from the chocolate fountains and ice sculpture martinis, Mark Warner doesn’t do a whole lot for me…
I missed out on that one completely. Were they really that good, or was it just the idea of progressives finally being bribed to support a Democratic candidate for President? A sorta “wow, I rode in a Rolls Royce” moment.
I have to confess that the setting (the entire top of the Stratosphere in Vegas) and the view, and the good company of some longtime BT regulars, greatly enhanced the experience.
Did I mention that the ice sculptures that the martinis were poured through and thus dispensed from were carved to look like computers? And then there’s the endless shrimp cocktail…
(and it was the first trip Boo and I ever took together)
Check. Citing soft-spoken centrist corporatist Mark Warner as one’s political role model for Dems is a jaw dropper. And in one important sense it’s no surprise he might seem to act as if he belongs in the senate, given that it’s a Millionaires Club and Warner is worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
As for me, our party desperately needs some of the far more outspoken and more populist types like Weiner and Grayson, else our side just gets steamrolled by the far more aggressive GOP and corrupted by powerful banking and corp interests.
If you’re going to get sanctimonious, you may as well spell the word “ameteur” correctly BooMan.
good point. Spellcheck didn’t alert.
On this you are wrong.
$150,000 is not a terribly large sum, even though it’s large to me at over 5 years salary at my wage (was told by management today that they pay “competitive” wages – found out this afternoon that their wage survey was confined to themselves & a few other sweatshop enterprises in one small community).
I wonder how that $150,000 compares to the sums these contractors extract from our taxes – I’ll bet they charge the government a premium while paying their employees squat.
If I’m wrong, show me some evidence – otherwise …
When you don’t have a means of raising up leadership from the grassroots, you depend on the folks with enough ego and drive to win. Progressives have a structural problem; they want to win national office without winning local and state office. And they are too much about the inside game to influence those folks outside of their personal networks to support progressive policies. Whereas conservatives are all over you to the point of intimidation.
Progressives talk about grassroots politics; but so far it’s mostly talk. Kucinich is a symptom. If Paul Ryan is the best Republicans can muster to respond to Obama’s State of the Union, Kucinich seems to be the best that a lot of progessives can muster as a leader. His rise to Congress should be more imitated than he himself should be seen as a progressive hero. He first ran for city council when he was 21; he first won when he was 23; he first ran for Congress at age 26 and ran again at 28; he was elected mayor of Cleveland at age 31 (he was a one-termer). For 17 years success eluded him; in 1996 he was elected to Congress for the first time. Where are the 21-year-old progressives gutsy enough to run for their city councils or county commissions/councils? Or for school board?
Reagan had some advantages over younger candidates. He had a base of folks who knew him from the movies and from the GE Theater propaganda show of the early 1960s. He stirred the 1964 Republican convention with his nominating speech for Barry Goldwater like Barack Obama stirred the 2004 Democratic convention with his keynote address. And then he was smart enough to run for governor at a point when a lot of California parents were scared that their kids were going to throw their lives away with this anti-war protesting. So he had a substantial base that trusted him before he ran, and he made a special point of cultivating and help organize the Republican Party in the South, aligning himself early with folks like Jesse Helms. His confidence came out of that long successful experience, 40 or so years of it before he was elected President. He acted like any idiot would agree with it because he had been selling it since the 1950s as a flak for GE. It’s hard for progressives to get that sort of experience.
Getting irritated at Kucinich, Weiner, or Grayson is not going to advance progressive politics.
We get the yelpers because the base demands them and rewards them with attention and campaign funds. Exactly the same reason that you have the yelpers on the right. All those confident Republicans are the ones who are bought out and know where their campaign funds are coming from. Of course they look like they belong in power; they are networked into power and are confident they can stay there.
What we need is a secure campaign infrastructure that can deliver the votes at the grassroots. Everything else is kabuki. A decision to vote for Kucinich or not does not rest on his reaction to an olive pit. Those who dislike him just have one more excuse; to those who like him, it doesn’t matter.
Well I’ll give you this one, I care fuck all about local issues. What matters to me is the big stuff. What can I do locally about climate change? Nothing. Only the kind of action government can take can preserve human civilization.
The cynicism about government begins with the cynicism about local government. The Tea Party folks are pissed off at how lawyers and developers dominate local politics and rip off people while increasing taxes and creating regulations that create barriers to starting small businesses as they are with the federal government. Local and state reform is key to restoring the faith that government can do anything.
The corruption in government starts at the local level and moves upward, and with Citizens United will get worse. The Wake County NC school board victory was bought with Koch Brothers money passed through Art Pope; increasingly the same figures who corrupt national politics will be corrupting local politics so that even reform in Washington cannot be undone.
When the political process is corrupted it gets corrupted from top to bottom. Change begins at the bottom, in local areas. Local engagement of national and global issues also build the pressure on national leaders to deal with those issues. And the local issues that can make a difference: eliminating regulations whose sole purpose is to enrich lawyers who fight them; eliminate “development incentive” tax breaks that make taxes go up for everyone else; modernize building codes to sllow for innovative and homeowner-driven construction techniques but nonetheless meet the criteria for high-quality living; change back from fee-based financing of sidewalks to tax-financed sidewalks; and on an on.
And have oversight over local government. As the news networks have become corporatized in national corporation, state and local news has essentially been dropped in any detail. Folks don’t know what their state legislators and local councils are doing, until an issue comes up to blindside them. More consistent coverage would provide a heads up and nip bad actions before they become done deals. And end the abuse of the use of “executive session” to avoid public accountability.
Political accountability starts at the local level. Tip O’Neill had it right. “All politics is local.” Even issues of global import come down to local politics where there is a difference between one person writing Congress and a unified group of a thousand people writing Congress all without it being spamming Congress.
Ah also, where are the 21 year olds? Drowning in college debt. That kind of stuff didn’t happen when Kucinich first ran because college was affordable then. Also Kucinich should not be let in 100 feet of an executive position, based on what I’ve read about his term as mayor his governing style (not goals) was very much like W.
You don’t have to go to college to be elected to office. Interesting but little appreciated fact.
Kucinich and executive offices: sure point out the difference between the folks with an attractive political philosophy (or ideology) and the folks who can get things done. The difference between Kucinich and W was that Kucinich was clueless at 31, and W was clueless at 54 and ten years later remains clueless.
On 21-year-olds: GOP 21-year-olds have found professional politics to be an excellent way to pay off college debt. I suspect that is what Christine O’Donnell is really up to. It would be good to find some 21-year-olds (and older) who run for office to pay off college debt and get stuff done for their constituents.
I’m not entirely sure I agree with this Progressives have a structural problem; they want to win national office without winning local and state office. Or this: Progressives talk about grassroots politics; but so far it’s mostly talk.
I’m a county board supervisor in rural Wisconsin, and the board here is full of progressives and liberals. The problem in my area is that jumping up to the next level above the extremely local requires that a politician be able to win support in the much more conservative neighboring areas, and almost no one’s been able to make that jump. At the level above that (Ron Kind’s district) the balance is such that someone even as moderately liberal as Kind is just barely electable.
For us at least, it’s not the local government positions that are hard to win, or that people aren’t trying to move up from there to the mid level state positions, it’s that those latter are a very hard nut to crack.
Okay Boo, no one disagrees that this suit is ridiculous and unbecoming a US Representative of the Democratic ilk. But this?
“I want progressives…”
I want liberals, liberal-socialists of the kind that made FDR and Johnson what they were, and made the Democratic party different from the Republicans, people like Kucinich, the only old-fashioned liberal-socialist left in the House because he will never go Republican Lite like the rest of them.
Sorry, Dennis must be forgiven. Dental pain can sometimes make one act irratic, even irrational and this looks like one of those times.
I don’t see anything wrong with this. These cases don’t ordinarily go to court. The caterer’s insurance company will offer Kucinich $40,000, and Kucinich’s lawyers will tell him to take it for fear of getting nothing if it does go to court. I think it’s pretty much everyday behavior.
As for the political implications, I think fighting tort reform is a lost cause. (Not that I have anything against lost causes, but there are more romantic ones.) Somehow, the public has bought the idea that consumers are predatory and corporations are victims. When I was quite young, it was explained to me that punitive damages were necessary; otherwise corporations would just keep acting irresponsibly and more people would be hurt. But most people don’t get that message, and we’ll have to brace ourselves for suffering a lot more injuries from the products we buy.
I’m with Booman on this one. Kucinich is a tone-deaf egomaniac (my experience once interviewing him one-on-one only confirmed the impression), and his Church of Dennis followers are doing him no favors. The sad thing is, I agree with him on almost every issue. But on many of the issues he takes on, DK is almost laughably ineffective, even among his few fellow congressional progressives. His ’08 run for the presidency, wherein he came back with the same message that got him almost zero traction or influence in 2004, pretty much cemented him as a laughingstock.
The part of Kucinich I wish I could clone is that he never sold out. Not only did he start young and keep plugging away in the face of adversity, but he’s never cashed out his ideals for a shot at more power. I suspect there’s a lesson in his history and that of Grayson (who in a normal election year probably would have been re-elected): progressive politics can play well in so-called “moderate” districts. But you can be an ideologue and still be an effective legislator. Progressives in Congress seem mostly to lack that combination.
As for the olive pit? It’s a fucking accident. Shit happens. Get over it. I hear Congress has pretty good dental coverage compared to, say, 99% of America.
I’m with Booman on this one. Kucinich is a tone-deaf egomaniac (my experience once interviewing him one-on-one only confirmed the impression), and his Church of Dennis followers are doing him no favors.
Can you name me one national level politician that’s not an egomaniac?
Fair point. But most of them don’t run for President, fail spectacularly, and then do the same thing again in the expectation that 100 million voters will see the error of their ways.
Can you name me one national level politician that’s not an egomaniac?
It’s actually not the egomania that’s a problem – it’s the tone-deafness.
Easy for you to say. I’ve accidentally bitten into one of those pits, and my teeth barely survived the encounter, and I still feel the pain just thinking about it years later. Close one, and I’ve learned since always to approach olives with great respect, and fingers before teeth.
That said, I like the fact that our legal system provides redress for what some call “accidents” — you can recover your personal damages plus recover enough in punitives such that the likelihood of other diners having the same brutal experience in that cafeteria is reduced. If it’s all just treated as an accident and no one is held accountable, there’s far less incentive for the server to improve their quality control.
I might have agreed with you that the suit is ridiculous had I not watched Democracy Now’s reports on Hot Coffee, a new documentary at Sundance. It covers 4 tort cases, including the woman who had 3rd degree burns over 15+% of her body after spilling a cup of McDonald’s coffee. When we were all passing judgment on her, I don’t think many of us realized that the temperature of the coffee, high enough to melt the container that it was in, was mandated by McDonald’s because it prolongs the coffee’s shelf life. So I’ve been reminded not to judge Kucinich without knowing the extent and avoidability of his injury.
I’m not embarrassed by his suit, just like I wasn’t embarrassed by John Edwards’ being a trial lawyer (later there were plenty of other things to be embarrassed about for him). He advocated for people who had been wronged. If there were a single persuasive Democratic politician who would unabashedly explain how representing plaintiffs in tort cases is an honorable profession, we wouldn’t have to distance ourselves so quickly from Kucinich.
I think the question isn’t Why can’t progressive politicians act like they belong there but rather Why can’t Democratic politicians who act like they belong there be progressive.
Having worked in this field for some time, I would also like to point out that the $150K initial demand was rather low, really. You always begin by asking for an unreasonable amount of money and negotiate from there.
Sure, accidents happen and we do tend to be a nation of sue happy people, but it is these kinds of cases that ensure that future mistakes aren’t made and more innocent people will not get hurt by idiotic blunders that could have been prevented.
with some backbone. As the saying goes – “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and tell me which one you get first”.
Amen, brother. I often use the Barry Sanders analogy, he was a class act, something we need much more of in our party and our country.