MANCHESTER — Dennis Kucinich stood in front of a crowd of 500
college and high school students, running a hand through his oil
black hair. The congressman from Ohio may be floundering at around
two percent in most statewide polls, but if you dropped in on him
at the New England College Convention Wednesday night, you’d think
he had the nomination in the bag.
“As president I will move quickly to decriminalize marijuana,”
Kucinich bellowed. The crowd rose to their feet, applauding wildly.
“We need to sensitize our nation to the class-based, race-based
nature of our criminal justice system,” he continued. The roar that
met him encouraged him to seal the deal: “And as president I will
end the federal death penalty!”
Absolute pandemonium erupted. I couldn’t even hear anymore.
People pumped their fists in the air. Two men came running into the
room and slid in next to me at my table. One started pounding his
applause out on the table. BANG! BANG! BANG! Both wore shirts that
said in bright red letters: “COPS SAY LEGALIZE DRUGS. ASK ME WHY.”
Their raucous enthusiasm, alas, discouraged any questioning.
Continuing his impression of a presidential campaign scripted by
the writers of Wayne’s World, Kucinich explained why he
had decided to run against such long odds: “There’s nothing like
being told ‘no way,’” he said, “and saying ‘way.’”
The youth responded with in-depth questions on substantial
policy issues. “Can you talk about civic involvement?” one young
man asked. “This administration makes us feel like when we walk
downtown it doesn’t make any difference.”
Another young woman approached the mike. “I think the biggest
problem in this world is nuclear warfare,” she said, in reference
to the numerous nuclear wars recently. “I mean, depletion, or
depleted uranium, or whatever. What will you do? Because, I mean,
the whole world could blow up.” Answer: We would scrap our whole
nuclear arsenal to “set an example” on the first day of the fabled
Kucinich presidency. (And on day two the lion would lie down with
the lamb.)
Throughout his speech, Kucinich angrily attacked anything that
might endear him to swing voters. But the students ate it up, as a
certain kind of kid is apt to do with anything that has a whiff of
danger about it. A lot of their parents, I mused, were probably
Republicans.
THE AIR THAT NIGHT was so charged that if Kucinich had asked for
volunteers to storm the White House, they’d have made it as least
as far as Connecticut. But it’s hard to know what — other than
self-aggrandizement — propels his campaign along. The congressman
recently told The Washington Post that he would exceed
expectations in New Hampshire “if I get one vote. Everybody will
say, ‘how did he get a vote?’”
No, Kucinich is running, like Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley
Braun, not to win but as a way to position himself. He is quickly
becoming the favorite politician-spokesman of the Blame America
First movement, perhaps the only one they can “trust” at all.
In his stump speeches, Kucinich often invokes the need to live
up to “American ideals.” But then everything he says about America
is so dastardly, so vicious, so demeaning, that if you’d never
heard of the U.S., you would think the world better off if the
rogue nation was destroyed by a large comet.
Kucinich believes we are on the “verge of a new age of
discontinuity” and that our “nation’s historic commitment at the
core of who we are as a people is beginning to shake, wobble, and
crack.” It may already be too late for us, he warns. “Will the
center hold in the face of the lies of Iraq? In the face of the
PATRIOT Act?”
In fact, we are no longer in control of our destiny because of
capitalism and globalization. “The idea of a market-based economy
becomes a terminal disease” under free-trade agreements, he said,
which have only “increased the stranglehold of global corporations
on the governments of the world.”
Iraq to Kucinich is simply Vietnam part deux. But he has an exit
strategy: America must immediately pull its military out of Iraq
and rebuild the country “to the extent we blew it up” in the first
place. We must pay reparations to the families of Iraqi civilians
killed in the war; we must foot the whole bill for a U.N.
peacekeeping force to take our place; and we must renounce any
interest in “privatizing” the Iraqi economy.
The alternative to Kucinich’s plan is “World War III.” Just for
good measure, he added, “It is indisputable that terrorism is worse
now than before 9/11.”
MOMENTS AFTER HE SAID this, a burly young man with a knit cap
pulled down over his eyes stood up and shouted, “Vote your hopes,
not your fears!” But amidst the cheers, I must have missed the
hope, even of the programmatic variety. Kucinich didn’t discuss his
beloved single-payer universal health-care plan in any substantial
way. The speech was instead a litany of American misdeeds and
impending disasters.
The kids were giddy though. A teenage girl at the table next to
me had a Kucinich bumper sticker across the seat of her pants.
Whenever he said something she really liked she’d get up and shake
her backside toward the stage.
“When we become aware of our power, our potency, that’s when
miracles start to happen,” was the thought that Kucinich left us
with. “I guess I know this because, at some point, I was too dumb
to quit.” Amen.
