| Dennis' street-corner strategy
By Steve Hoffman, Beacon Journal editorial writer When Al Gore was campaigning in Cleveland in December 1999, he picked up the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor, had by then resurrected a political career almost extinguished when the city plunged into default in 1978, during his one and only term as executive. Gore, still battling former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley for the Democratic presidential nomination, was in his neo-populist phase, dressed in slacks and a sweater of muted tones and with a throaty roar in his voice. Gore was doing OK at Dimitri's Restaurant, a West Side diner frequented by Kucinich. Then Kucinich dragged Gore out onto the sidewalk to meet a gaggle of the congressman's shock troops, the neighborhood irregulars whose support Kucinich had re-earned from the ground up, going door to door. It was an interesting moment. Kucinich, dressed in black combat boots, blue jeans and a long woolen overcoat, outdid Gore in fiery rhetoric. For a brief moment, Gore appeared totally out of his element. He told the group he was ``proud to be part of your team.'' The campaign moved on. What this moment said about Gore became apparent on Election Day, as Kucinich feared. Despite pulling the plug on television advertising, Gore came within 4 percentage points of George W. Bush in Ohio. Perhaps it was just a small agony in the big picture, but that street-corner scene couldn't help but raise the question about Gore's ability to connect with people. Funny how things work out. Gore has dropped out of the running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, and Kucinich officially has opened an exploratory committee. At small gatherings of Democratic activists in Iowa, where caucuses early next year will kick off the presidential nominating process, Kucinich has been making some headway, although not enough to put together the fund-raising and organizational structure needed for a full-fledged campaign. It's just like he's out campaigning on the street corner again. Organized labor likes Kucinich because he has promised to drop out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if elected. Peace activists like him because he is the only member of Congress seeking his party's presidential nomination to have voted against the use of force in Iraq, and he would establish a Department of Peace. Those worried about losing their health-care benefits like Kucinich because he has proposed a national health-care plan. His ability to lock his political radar onto the concerns of constituencies in the Democratic base could make the former ``boy mayor'' of Cleveland (now 56) a player of sorts in the crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates in much the same way oddball candidates can attract attention during PTA candidates' nights or other forums where each hopeful is allotted equal time. The format establishes a degree of legitimacy even though the underlying process of getting one's name on the ballot (or setting up an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States) is a simple, routine task. Add a suit and tie and a few pat phrases, and the candidate is off and running. Perhaps Kucinich's problem is that he connects too well. Kucinich has taken a few shots for flip-flops made in an apparent attempt to realign himself with a broader sector of the electorate than can be found on Cleveland's West Side, but his real problem is that he is too deeply rooted in his Cleveland-area district to do anything more than push his party to the left, where it can't win. Kucinich's effort to move the political discussion in his party is happening just as the Bush team's right-wing agenda on domestic issues is leaving a great opportunity for moderate Democrats to attract suburban voters worried about education, health care, Social Security and jobs. The flip-flops are bad enough. Once on the presidential campaign trail, Kucinich immediately changed his long held anti-abortion stand to embrace a ``pro-choice'' position. And in recent days, he has dropped his stand against sanctions against Iraq, which he once blamed for the deaths of ``hundreds of thousands of children.'' Kucinich now says Saddam Hussein should be removed from power by using sanctions ``to thwart his effort to grow.'' Worse is that Kucinich's political experience and grounding in Cleveland's West Side politics, which enabled him to come back from the near-death experience of being beaten in a 1979 mayoral re-election campaign by Republican George Voinovich, has forced him into a mind set that is reflexively anti-business and anti-trade. Nobody likes it when corporations cut back or cancel health-care benefits, but how would Kucinich pay for a national health-care plan? He hasn't really said. Nobody is happy when steel mills are downsized or shut down, the furnaces that put food on the table for families for decades left cold. But what's the answer to a global overcapacity in the steel industry? More tariffs drive up the cost of goods for American consumers and hurt domestic industries that import steel goods. And what about the thriving domestic companies that are successful because they export to Canada and Mexico? Are they to be cut off from their markets? Where are their workers supposed to go? The steel mills? Hey, if you like what this guy did for Cleveland, you'll love what he can do for the country. |