06/04/03
Tim Russo

A while ago, I saw my congressman, Dennis Kucinich, interviewed on the BBC - a glimpse of home for this wayward Clevelander in Britain.

The caption read, "Candidate for U.S. President." On whether this brought me pride or something else, I shall demur. At the time, British television was desperate to find any U.S. politician who would speak against war in Iraq, which Kucinich did admirably.

To Kucinich's counterparts in Britain, members of parliament (MPs), the notion of tilting against windmills as just one member of a big legislature would be familiar. Using this position to run for head of state would be another matter. For in Britain, the basic political structure of the parliamentary system that makes quixotic crusading safe political terrain also prevents awkward lunges for the keys to 10 Downing Street. Perhaps Kucinich should take note.

To become an MP, you first must be "selected" by the members of your local party. There is no primary: It's a bit like Jimmy Dimora canceling the primaries and holding a big meeting to decide the Democratic candidate for Congress. In Britain, the party infrastructure decides the rules of the selection process, and local party members vote. Thus the party controls who the candidate will be, not the electorate.

At the general election, of course, the electorate decides who wins the seat itself, mainly voting by party, not by candidate. Once elected, incumbency will likely keep an MP in parliament, just as in the United States. Party rules make it hard to de-select a sitting MP, and electoral patterns that make a seat safe in Ohio also make seats safe in the UK. But in the UK, the party is the source of the incumbent's staying power; the candidate is almost meaningless. In the United States, it's usually the other way around. For example, Kucinich is one congressional candidate with appeal in the electorate beyond his party. It's a position he's carefully cultivated over his long comeback from Cleveland's default, while slowly locking in the party's support. By making himself the issue, Kucinich has ridden to the top, to the bottom, and back to the top of Cleveland politics.

But party largely overtakes personality in Britain, from candidate selection to the prime minister. Just as congressmen decide who'll be the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, MPs decide who is prime minister. No one in Britain "votes" for prime minister the way we vote for president. Blair's party decides how far he goes in politics, and through the party, the electorate, not the other way around.

So if you find yourself in Parliament, and the party structure over time makes it clear they're happy to have you hold that seat, but have no other plans for you, the aspiration to be prime minister fades pretty fast and the impulse to engage in nonsensical hijinks often becomes irresistible.

Thus we hear stories about anti-war British MPs riding double decker buses to Baghdad, gleefully wallowing in the windmill tilting wilderness. If you are in a safe seat in the UK, have no leadership prospects, and you don't do anything moronic to get yourself de-selected, political life can easily reduce to one endless and consequence-free giving of a piece of one's mind.

Which brings us back to Kucinich. Despite its glass ceiling, the UK's parliamentary system, reliant on political party rather than personality, protects the maverick MPs from political oblivion, because they are insulated from both the electorate and their party leadership.

Kucinich is insulated from neither. Assuming he isn't giving an acceptance speech at the 2004 convention in Boston, soon he will face his primary electorate for his congressional seat, and through them his party. He will then face the full electorate in a seat that was held by a Republican less than a decade ago (Martin Hoke, before redistricting). This will occur after a fanciful presidential campaign in which he's clumsily alienated a large portion of his base on numerous critical issues.

America's a great place. Anyone can run for president, including my quirky congressman. But there are consequences, and in America, unlike the UK, they aren't confined to the personal ambitions of the candidate. Kucinich's lovable peculiarities would threaten neither his seat nor his party if he were British.

In Ohio, though, his foibles have already given rise to one Republican with a decisive Democratic base, George Voinovich, whose ascendancy just happened to coincide with the complete destruction of the Ohio Democratic Party. If Kucinich isn't careful, history may repeat itself. The BBC probably won't care much about that, but Ohio Democrats will.

Russo, an attorney and political consultant from Cleveland (and currently on vacation here), lives and works in London.

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