Opinion of Dennis Kucinich

[TJ in Oregon]

Dennis Kucinich is the perfect example of someone who is both a Freedom Fighter and a Horrible Person.

On the Freedom Fighter side, Dennis! (as his election lawn signs say) isn’t normally afraid to take an unpopular stand and in fact he rather seems to enjoy it. He is a constant thorn in the side of everyone and a relentless opponent of war. His upbringing was far from ideal, he moved over 20 times and his father was an alcoholic who beat him. Dennis! likes to tell a story about how he snuck out of his house to be in his school Christmas pageant and his father beat him for it. For most of his childhood he wanted to grow up to be a Catholic priest. He rose from that terrible situation to the Cleveland City Council, where he famously (well in Cleveland anyway) declared that “There is corruption in City Hall” and was elected the youngest mayor of any major US city to that point at 31 years old. In many ways his time as mayor was a total disaster, but he did manage to save the Municipal Lighting Corporation from being bought out, something a lot of people still deeply respect him for to this day. He took a break from politics for a while but eventually ran for Congress on the west side. There are countless times through Cleveland’s decline where Kucinich would be the only politician to show up at 3am to protest the closing of a factory or a hospital. His Congressional Office is considered one of the best run and an amazingly large number of people trust and respect him way beyond that of other politicians because he has been so vocal about protecting all in the local community. That’s one of the strange paradoxes about Dennis Kucinich: his political base in Cleveland is totally different from nationally. Most of his local support comes from blue-collar ethnic Catholic neighborhoods that really aren’t that liberal.

On the other side, Kucinich has slowly become an attention-seeking parody of himself. When he decided to start running for president in 2003, he also did a complete flip on abortion, which for most of his political career he was vehemently opposed to regardless of who might criticize him for it. That position was in line with one of his most important core beliefs, the importance of the strong protecting the weak. But, it became politically inconvenient to have that position while running for the Democratic nomination for president. As he became more and more of a national figure, he seemed to stop caring so much about the local community that built his political career. He’s stopped showing up when no one is looking and has become the first person in line to get his face on television at every possible juncture. In the last fourteen years, he’s written a grand total of three bills that have been signed into law, and one of them literally was renaming a post office. Throughout all of this his re-election margin keeps dwindling as he loses local respect. He’s on his third wife now, too. Dennis! has more or less become a walking caricature.