Waiting for Lefty

You're looking at a guy who believes he can beat a rigged game," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He's sitting in a cramped eight-seat jet, flying from Des Moines, Iowa, back to his home in Washington, D.C. It's the last leg of a three-day, eleven-state sprint, during which Kucinich formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Kucinich has been in almost constant political motion for nearly twelve hours, in a day that has taken him from St. Louis to Des Moines. He has stood behind a number of podiums jabbing his finger in the air and has needled fellow candidates at a Des Moines hotel ballroom forum sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons. At various points, he has scattered sound bites into anonymous microphones and hurriedly shaken hundreds of hands with the politician's art of pausing just long enough to make the moment seem personal. And now he is rushing back to the Capitol to enter into the Congressional Record his opposition to President Bush's request for an additional $87 billion to spend on what Kucinich terms "the occupation of Iraq."

Dennis Kucinich is the rare office-seeker who is able to convincingly present himself as a man driven by principle rather than power. Which may account for the fact that, since he began running for the nation's highest office earlier this year, the fifty-seven-year-old progressive has registered in the lower depths of the polls and has struggled to raise money. The son of a Cleveland truck driver, Kucinich brings a fascinating and unlikely life story to this race. He grew up in some of the city's roughest neighborhoods. His family, which never owned a house, lived, as he puts it in his stump speech, "in twenty-one homes by the time I was seventeen, including a few cars." In 1969, he was elected to the Cleveland City Council when he was just nineteen. In 1977, pushing a platform he called "new urban populism," he became the city's mayor, a jug-eared thirty-one-year-old so young and boy-genius fresh that he looked more like a spelling-bee champ than a big-city-muscle politician.

It seemed at the time that he was on his way to becoming a working-class Kennedy. But within eighteen months, Kucinich became associated not with glamorous political ascent but with young-man-in-a-hurry overreaching and Rust Belt futility. Kucinich, the self-styled scourge of "greedy corporate bloodsuckers," had staked his mayoralty on a battle for control of Cleveland's city-owned Municipal Light Company. When a private utility tried to force the city into selling Muni Light, Kucinich refused. Boy mayors weren't supposed to act this way. Cleveland's big banks, in cahoots with the private utility, called in the city's loans, forcing Cleveland into default. In 1979, Kucinich lost his bid for re-election.

For the next fifteen years, Kucinich was a pariah. Unable to find a job, he nearly lost his house. On his 1982 tax return, he declared an income of thirty-eight dollars. But in those years, Kucinich says, he began a journey inward. "I spent a lot of time out in the desert, in New Mexico," he says. "Thinking about things like purpose, how our thinking creates outcomes. And how the unity of thought, purpose and deed has such power." He credits his close friend, actress, writer and New Age avatar Shirley MacLaine, godmother to his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Jackie, with helping him through this period. "I was having some tough times financially," he says. "Shirley was there for me."

He emerged a changed man: "That time enabled me to take a journey that most career politicians never have a chance to take," he says. It also led him toward a set of ideas that are not exactly in step with Western concepts of reality. "I happen to believe," he says, "that the past, present and future exist simultaneously. . . . I look at the world as being interdependent. It informs everything I do." But he is also quick to point to his achievements in practical politics. "I started off as a city councilman," he says, "making sure that the street lights were on, that police responded in time." Every time Kucinich has gained office, he has done so by beating a Republican incumbent.

Kucinich ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988, but vindication came five years later, when, in 1993, Kucinich's refusal to sell Cleveland's Municipal Light was credited with having saved rate-payers more than $100 million. The next year, Kucinich was elected to the Ohio state senate. In 1996, he won a seat in Congress. Since then, he has become one of its most prominent liberals and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

As he gained more power in mainstream politics, he also deepened his commitment to a holistic way of life, adopting a vegan diet. On most campaigns, aides arrange for their candidate to be met by cheering wherever they go; Kucinich's people have to make sure that supporters bring organic vegetables and Mason jars of homemade miso soup.

Kucinich represents the left-most edge of mainstream politics, combining the populist dream of "one big union" with New Age tenets of infinite interconnection -- collective bargaining meets the collective unconscious. He speaks out practically, if not poetically, on building-block leftist positions such as single-payer health insurance, repeal of the Bush tax cuts, saving family farms and strong environmental protection. On other issues, he swings toward a sort of "Kumbaya" pacifism, advocating, for instance, the creation of a Department of Peace, dedicated to promoting nonviolence. The idea, of course, has a certain naive practicality -- who's against peace? -- but it also seems goofily dismissable in our age of perpetual war. (But then again, if you think about it, it certainly seems a lot less crazy, and expensive, than Bush's dream of building a space-based nuclear-missile shield.)

Though it might be easy to write off Kucinich as the candidate of the gray-haired dude with a ponytail who recycled long before it was the law, he is also the last progressive in the race presenting big, daring ideas with verve and intelligence - is anyone else saying we should pull out of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization? No political expert would give Kucinich even half a chance, but he's unfazed. "The campaign is still young," he says. "There's plenty of time left on the clock. And in politics, I'm the master of the two-minute drill."

Of the nine people now running for your party's nomination, you are the only one to have voted against the current war in Iraq. Last fall, that seemed like a risky position, but now, opposition to the war seems almost a prerequisite to being taken seriously by voters.

When Dick Gephardt, who was still House minority leader last fall, stood with George Bush in the Rose Garden and endorsed his Iraq policy, it was absolutely devastating for the Democratic Party. Nearly two-thirds of the Democrats in the House voted against the resolution, but because the party's leadership supported it, the Democrats were falsely credited with being in favor of the war. We lost the opportunity to be in a position of outright and open opposition. And as a result, the Democrats lost a chance to take back the Congress.

Now you are against Bush's request for an additional $87 billion to fund the occupation of Iraq.

I'm advocating that we end the occupation. We need to stop any financing for the present or future deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq. We're in Iraq based on a lie, pure and simple.

You mean we just pull out and leave? Don't we have a responsibility to rebuild the country?

The presence of our troops there makes it essentially antithetical to the stabilization of Iraq. Our troops are targets. My plan is this: Let the U.S. get out, but with these terms. First of all, the U.N. handles all the oil revenues. Those resources belong to the Iraqi people. Number two: The U.N. handles all the contracts. There can't be anymore Halliburton deals, can't be any more big contracts for administration contributors. It's time that we end war profiteering.

America almost pulled the world into supporting the invasion, and America may be able to pull the world community into an agreement that still permits the U.S. to have control over these aspects. But we're not going to reach a solution. It will keep breaking down until the U.N. gets in fully, with the members providing troops. Until we get the U.S. out, we're never going to have peace there. And the U.N. has to handle the cause of building a new government, which is not a puppet government of the United States. If we insist on the right to choose, then Iraq becomes our fifty-first state. Which it may well be on its way to becoming, based on the amount of money we're spending there.

I wonder, though: Look what a utility company in Ohio did when you stood up to it -- they destroyed your mayoralty. What's going to happen when huge, politically connected companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel decide they don't want to lose these billion-dollar contracts handed to them by the Bush administration?

The power of a mayor is nothing compared to the executive power of the president. Let's just say that I would use the full executive power of the presidency to protect the interests of the American people. And that I would expect to have a very cooperative relationship with American businesses. Matter of fact, I think my presidency would be good for them, because I would help restore a sense of ethics in the economy. Now, those businesses that would try to use their influence to try to capsize a government might find that they'd be dealing with someone who has broader experience in government than they might imagine.

Dealing with Iraq is just part of a bigger puzzle no one has been able to solve. And all the problems in the region are greatly complicated by our dependence on foreign oil. Saudi oil powers our economy. How do we get off it without driving ourselves into ruin?

Our quest for oil darkens the heart of this nation. And it points out the urgency of sustainability, in the broadest sense of the word. Neither the economy nor the environment nor the geopolitical realities can long countenance this country's continued reliance on oil and other nonsustainable, nonrenewable forms of energy. In the early Sixties, President Kennedy offered a challenge to the American people -- a broad vision that would reflect the ingenuity of America, the creativity, the spirit of America -- and he said that the goal of America should be to put someone on the moon. That sparked a surge of interest in science, general support for education, a belief that we had a collective responsibility to our nation, to participate in a common goal. I intend to take to this country the same clarion call for sustainability -- to seek to build for America a renewable-energy portfolio of twenty percent by 2010. Which would consist of massive investment in solar, hydrogen, geothermal, biomass, wind . . . and other energy systems.

But as long as the Saudis hold down the price of oil, what's our incentive to switch? As long as oil hovers around thirty dollars a barrel, will there be any urgency?

Obviously, you don't stop it on a dime. You phase things in.

Then, of course, there are those who say that the development of alternative energy is potentially a much bigger boost for the economy than the tech boom of the 1990s.

We have not even begun to test our ability to use the development of energy technology as a way to spur the economy, because there's real economic benefits. Those are the industries of the future, and they're just ahead of us. We can't even imagine where that could go.

How do you prepare people for these changes?

It could happen rather quickly. Changes in technology will occur because of a quantum leap in our social systems. They'll work synergistically. It's just inevitable. But we need to quicken the pace by providing incentives for it to happen. I want to see a major effort in developing public-private partnerships, particularly for energy, so that alpha-stage technology, developed by NASA, could be taken to a beta stage, licensed or sold to the private sector, for the purpose of developing new industries.

I was at your rally this morning, and what struck me was how your ideas really hearkened back to New Deal politics, with your calls for massive public-works programs and heightened federal regulatory powers. Democrats don't really talk about Franklin Roosevelt anymore. They all compare themselves to Kennedy and Truman. Why is this?

A succession of Democratic presidents have not celebrated the potency of New Deal economics but have celebrated instead a more measured, corporate approach.

So you're saying they've bowed down to the big money?

Of course. How could it even be a question? Your candidacy seems to be built on the idea that the people are looking for another New Deal-type program. But the New Deal didn't happen until the country was mired in a depression. Do you think things have really gotten that bad now?

When you consider that most Americans are maxed out on their credit cards, when you consider that most Americans are no longer guaranteed employment security, when you consider how many pension funds are going belly up, when you look at the corruption on Wall Street and the failure of the SEC to police Wall Street, when you consider that major corporations are cheating their stockholders -- last year 250 corporations restated their earnings, lied about their earnings . . . we have a system that's being run in a way that closely resembles a criminal enterprise.

There's a great gap in our society -- and it's widening. You see what's happening in our corporations, where executives are paid hundreds of times what the workers are paid. There should be a limit on executive compensation, on the multiples between the lowest-paid and highest-paid. The maldistribution of wealth in this society, the intensification of it, is a threat to our democracy. As wealth accelerates to the top, democracy is led to the scaffold.

When you emerged on the scene, you were hailed as a child of the 1960s bringing a new kind of energy into the political scene. With today's anti-war movement, do you see parallels to the Sixties?

Young people strive for authenticity. They strive for consistency. They want to see something real. This is the appeal of Ani DiFranco, for example. And I think that's where I connect with young people. And I see it coming back. It's like it's ready to happen again. You can feel it. But this isn't about retro. This is about the future.

You say that, but isn't the Dean campaign the one catching on with youth? Is that difficult for you to see happening?

Look, I don't begrudge him anything. The campaign is still young. We're organized on the Web as well. Check out our site [Kucinich.us]. But it's not just about that. The media tend to focus on the technical structures of campaigns. But the appeal of this campaign is heart.

People are waiting for someone who connects with their heart, for someone who doesn't judge them but who is ready to show the practical application of peace and love in everyday America. Not peace as an abstraction but as something that can structure society.

Why are you so confident that you can win?

I have experience in looking at situations that everyone says are impossible, and reaching in and finding that other possibility of drawing it forth. You know, in quantum physics there are some who write about what's called the "implicant order." It's something that's just, you know, beyond your vision, but it's there. And what I try to do is draw forth that order that is there. And when that happens, people say, "Oh, that's a miracle." No, it was always there -- it was just waiting to be called forth. And so I think I can do that with this nation.

(October 22, 2003)