Kucinich: Tears of a Clown

By Nathaniel Ward | Friday, January 23, 2004

With Dennis Kucinich as president, America—indeed, the world at large—will never again face the horrors of war, the foreign relations nightmare that is national sovereignty, or even the curse of free-market prosperity.Surprisingly well-spoken, the long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful and Ohio Congressman spoke at Dartmouth at the Hinman Forum on January 15th. He condemned his democratic opponents for running campaigns based on hatred. A platform of Bush-hatred, he explained, will do little except divide the nation: "Voters will respond to vision, they'll respond to hope, they'll respond to passion, they'll respond to love." Mr. Kucinich's bold endorsement of love drew incredulous snickers from most of the audience.

One of the central tenets of his campaign has been the creation of an all-encompassing "Department of Peace," an empathetic federal agency that would end domestic violence, ensure international cooperation, and keep schoolchildren from chewing gum in class. He attempted to flesh out the Department for a good fifteen minutes, devoting much of his time to the problems it would resolve without an iota of explanation of how it would do so. His vague promises seem to augur well for the Department.

Of equal importance, at least judging by his emphasis, was a bizarre concept more at home in a cheap science fiction novel than in a presidential campaign. In a Kucinich administration, he said, "the evolutionary trend will be punctuated and a quantum leap will occur." Get it? Me neither.

But some Kucinich supporters did understand his messages of peace and love: the hippies. That's right, Kucinich has a devout crew of hippies following him around the country in a tie-died bio-diesel bus from California. (We're serious; see www.democreation.org.) Sadly, the vehicle, dubbed the "Democreation" bus, broke down earlier in the day. Still, their spirits were high; various elements hawked pastel peace T-shirts (100 percent organic cotton, man!) and copies of Thaddeus Jude's musical masterpiece "arpeggiated amplidynes." Others distributed Kucinich literature throughout the event, while a couple kept close guard over the bongo drum and tambourine.

Mr. Kucinich, meanwhile, rambled on and accused the government of dark conspiracies. The PATRIOT Act, he claimed, routinely suppresses the rights of Americans, though he cited no specific cases. It, apparently, was a self-evident truth. More importantly, the United States is splurging on a vast arsenal of as-yet-nonexistent space-based weapons, when it could be throwing money into universal health coverage.

Corporations are evil, he claimed, and detrimental to the world, since they depress the living conditions of Third World wage-laborers by giving them regularly-paying factory jobs instead of lives as beggars, almsmen, or subsistence farmers. American agricultural and steel subsidies must also be maintained in order to promote Third World growth, he continued, since erecting barriers to trade has such an illustrious track-record of fostering growth.

Mr. Kucinich's hazy, contradictory arguments regarding interactions with the world at large continued throughout his speech. He advocated withdrawal from the sovereignty-robbing World Trade Organization, the poverty-causing North American Free Trade Agreement, and the nascent pollution-generating Free Trade Area of the Americas—using as a precedent President Bush's decision to leave the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Mr. Kucinich vociferously opposed. Nevertheless, he supported the ratification of other treaties that would solve all of the world's problems, including the Kyoto global warming protocols, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Anti-Landmine Treaty.

Though he had previously announced plans to repeal all of President Bush's tax cuts while adding to federal outlays, Mr. Kucinich waffled on the issue of the budget. "It's a daunting time" to run for president, he explained, "especially for someone who was mayor of a city which went into default." While he ran Cleveland's city government in the late 1970s, he blatantly ignored the advice of, well, the experts—the economists, bankers, and elected representatives—when he refused to sell the city's struggling electrical monopoly; as a result the city defaulted on $50 million in loans. Likewise, eschewing the advice of experts formed the foundation of his congressional campaigns in 1994 and 1996.

Ignoring reality seems to be his strategy this time around, too. Though Carol Mosley Braun, the only candidate with lower standing in the polls, dropped out of the race earlier in the day he spoke, Mr. Kucinich claimed he was not planning to withdraw his candidacy. He reassured voters, including a tiny group from Vermont seeking to enter his name on the ballot for the state's March primary, that he would remain in the race until the Democrats' August convention. With his vision, hope, passion, and love, he is sure to win.

Kucinich: Tears of a Clown

Article Tools

Related Articles