Dennis Kucinich lost his Congressional seat in Ohio’s primary this week, an redistricting-induced election that was designed for him to lose by throwing him into a new district comprised mostly of the old district of his incumbent opponent, establishment Democrat Marcy Kartur.
The fact that his state’s Democratic leadership was fine with sacrificing Kucinich tells you a lot, but not all, about his career in Congress and his assorted presidential campaigns. I’m of two minds about Kucinich. I have agreed with many of his viewpoints, and he has frequently been proven right – on Iraq, on Wall Street and corporate power, on civil liberties, on free trade, on the War on Drugs – when establishment politicians of both parties were wrong. On the other hand, he has always struck me as “right message, wrong messenger.” It wasn’t just his policy positions that set him up as a consistent object of Village ridicule.
Both views of Kucinich, lunatic and saint, have been well-represented this week in the Intertubez. Mainstream media, from the Washington Post and New Yorker to the New Republic and Andrew Sullivan, couldn’t resist one final sneer. On the flip side, progressives like John Nichols have been busy issuing hagiographic eulogies, and even Glenn Greenwald has now come out with a full-throated defense of Kucinich’s legacy.
Where I think Greenwald errs (and, like Booman, I take issue with Greenwald only very cautiously – he’s a formidable debater) is in the idea that, in the political arena, being right on the issues is enough:
…enacting legislation is not the only way to have an important impact on our political culture. Shining light on otherwise-ignored issues, advocating rarely-heard political positions, using one’s platform to highlight the corruption of those in power and to challenge their warped belief systems are all vitally important functions. Advocacy of that sort may not produce immediate, tangible successes, but it is a prerequisite for changing prevailing political mores and persuading citizens to think differently. “Talking a lot” is a synonym for persuasion, advocacy and debate. It’s far from “doing very little.” Those are all critical steps in changing a political system….Those types of changes often take years, even decades, of advocacy, and urgently need those with public platforms to amplify the underlying views to change how citizens think.
That’s all true – but I see no evidence that Kucinich had such an effect on the broader public discourse. If anything, his impact has been negative.
Just before the 2004 Iowa caucuses, I interviewed Kucinich one-on-one. I found him personally arrogant (which, to be fair, has not been the experience of others I’ve known who’ve met him – maybe it was a bad day – nor is it a unique quality among presidential candidates) and delusional about his appeal to both constituents and colleagues. In a sense, this isn’t surprising; for someone in a position of power to routinely go up against the received truths of both parties, including his own, requires a certitude of self and a conviction of one’s own correctness and impact that’s probably pathological. Progressives railed against those characteristics when Dubya evinced them. In moderation, it’s called leadership. As a constant practice, it gets you branded crazy and nuts.
The same certitude, in the case of Kucinich, also meant he either didn’t realize or didn’t care that talking about seeing UFOs, or his vegan diet, or his creepily much younger (and much taller) trophy wife, or his signature pipe dream, the Department of Peace (a lovely concept that will be taken seriously by Washington the day Hell melts), discredited his other more relatable points in the eyes of many people. Of course, Washington has had eccentric but effective politicians before, and a lot of highly respected and decorated politicians have vomited up their share of lunatic ideas over the years. (People revere FDR, who interred US citizens due to their ancestry and tried to pack the Supreme Court.) But eccentric plus ideas outside the mainstream is not a good combination. Kucinich, with no successful legislation to speak of to his credit and laughably poor results in his presidential runs, has accomplished little more in his congressional career than ratifying the views of people who already agree with him.
That’s not enough. In modern politics, where personal image, “likeability,” and “values” count for far more in the public’s mind than ideas, trumpeting personal beliefs and practices far outside the mainstream is a kiss of death for being taken seriously, even if the other, political points you’re making make sense. If those points are also outside the mainstream, it doesn’t simply, as Greenwald would have it, “amplify views.” It also discredits them.
Folks that I’ve encountered over the years in what I’ll call the Church of Dennis – people who fawned over Kucinich because he spoke their truth to power – are a subset of a larger and frustratingly common belief among too many progressives that, in politics, it’s enough to be right, that facts alone will win the day. As Republicans learned long ago, that just ain’t so. You have to build coalitions, find your sources of power, and wield them effectively.
Having facts on your side can help, but if they don’t help the position you’ve already staked out, you can just invent your own “facts” now. It’s an appalling aspect of American politics, and of an establishment media whose tolerance of, if not enthusiasm for, lies and emotional demagoguery enables such behavior. But being appalling makes it no less real, and that’s why, for all his long national profile, Kucinich’s absence from Congress won’t mean much at all. He told truth to power, sure; but power didn’t care, and not enough other people were convinced of his views that power needed to care. And Kucinich, forever the gadfly, was so wedded to the notion that facts carry the day that he never developed power of his own.
The story is not quite over. Last year Kucinich spent a lot of time out here in Western Washington, before the redistricting plans were announced in Ohio and in our state, in anticipation of possibly being redistricted out of his Ohio district and with the creation of a new district (WA-10) here. In the end, he decided his chances were better against Kaptur, not least because the thought of his possible carpetbagging into a Congressional seat 2400 miles from his career-long political base was not met enthusiastically by party leaders here.
Now, with Kucinich having lost his primary, and the filing deadline in Washington state not until June, he’s talking again about coming to WA-10 (which is centered around Olympia, not suburban Seattle as was widely expected). The new WA-10 is a swing district, rated “leans Democratic,” and not at all a good fit for Kucinich’s brand of progressive populism. The current frontrunner, Denny Heck, is a centrist Dem who lost Brian Baird’s open WA-03 seat to a Tea Partier in 2010. Dick Muri, who lost to Rep. Adam Smith in WA-09 in 2010, is the leading Republican candidate.
Kucinich would bring out a fervent base of supporters from Olympia (home not just of the state capitol but the defiantly hippie-centric Evergreen State College); in Washington’s odd primary system, where the top two finishers regardless of party advance to the general election, he would most likely split the Democratic vote in a swing district. That would ensure the Republican front-runner finishes first and either weakens Heck for the general or knocks him out and sets up Kucinich to suffer a November bloodbath in a district where he has no history and the electorate largely does not share his politics. Dennis would have a lot of national grass roots support and money, but very little in-district support beyond the liberal oasis in Olympia – which hasn’t elected a progressive Congressperson since Jolene Unsoeld 20 years ago.
Heck’s no prize, but in a year where the fight for control of the House might be very close, he’s far better than the Republican alternative. Kucinich, true to form, doesn’t seem to care: a final oblivious gift to a party he’s never had much use for anyway.
