Is America ready for its first vegan president?
Please.
Maybe its first woman president. Perhaps a black president. Possibly
even a Latino president. And, as Chris Rock pointed out, we’ve got a
retarded president right now. But a guy who faults a cheeseburger on
two counts, the meat and the cheese? A vegan president? No
fucking way. Don’t be retarded.
And most certainly not this particular vegan, Ohio congressman
Dennis Kucinich. This is a candidate who announces, on national
television, that he would refuse to shoot a Hellfire missile at Osama
bin Laden if given the opportunity; a guy who prattles on about the
interconnectedness of humanity and his plans for creating a
cabinet-level Department of Peace; a man who brags about the
wonderfully low blood pressure his animal-cruelty-free diet has brought
him (memo to the Kucinich campaign: Americans like their leaders
carnivorous and on the verge of cardiac arrest, thank you very
much—see, for example, our last two presidents: Bill Clinton and
Dick Cheney).
Sure, it might be unfair, a cosmic and karmic injustice even, that
Kucinich, who was more right about the Iraq war than most Democrats
(and, for the record, more right than one of the meat-eating authors of
this vegan-bashing profile), now has less chance of being president
than U.S. troops have of stumbling across those alleged Iraqi WMDs.
But that’s the way we roll here in America.
This is a country in which 41 percent of people still believe that
Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. This is a country in which
some people still believe that there is some sort of dignified way out
of Iraq—”home with honor” is how the pollsters and strategists
describe the widespread sentiment—and, delusional or not, these
Americans don’t see much “honor” in our troops marching out of the
Middle East on the orders of a five-foot-seven, turn-the-other-cheek
waif who flashes peace signs without irony and wouldn’t eat a steak
with the boys once they’re back home.
None of this stops Kucinich, however. Long odds never have. He
soldiers on (sorry, too militaristic?), making his second consecutive
run at the White House, and no more likely to win this time around than
in 2004—although, as he points out at every opportunity, times
have changed considerably since his last go at the presidency, when he
received just 1 percent of the delegate votes at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention in Boston.
“The American people are ready for peace and they know I was right,”
Kucinich said during an interview in New Hampshire in early June, after
a CNN debate that gave him relatively little airtime and saw him
positioned, on the stage, at the furthest left fringe of the seven
other Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Because he’s a peace candidate who nevertheless loves a political
fight, Kucinich followed up his comments with a jab at the other
Democratic contenders who supported the war. “Others,” he said, in
reference to Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, “were wrong.”
Yeah, Hillary and John were wrong, Dennis, just like most of the
American people—you know, the American people, those
flag-waving meat eaters you’re trying to talk into voting for you.
We’re guessing they don’t like being reminded that they were wrong any
more than your opponents do.
Kucinich, 61, has long been an “everyone else is wrong” type of guy,
the type of politician who strikes a certain type of liberal as totally
righteous for his unwillingness to compromise. But he strikes a lot of
other liberals—a clear majority, as evidenced by his vote totals
in liberal-dominated Democratic primaries—as obnoxious and
inflexible to an agenda-hobbling degree. It’s hard to find anyone,
however, who doesn’t see him as exceptionally driven.
Kucinich was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1946, to a working-class
family that saw some hard times; on occasion, his family was forced to
sleep in cars. He made his first attempt at public office at the age of
20, filing a petition to run for a spot on the Cleveland City Council
despite the fact that he couldn’t legally vote yet. The year was 1967,
and at the time he was still a sophomore at Cleveland State University,
working toward a degree in communications. Kucinich didn’t succeed in
that first run for office, but just over two years later he did,
joining the city council at the age of 23. If that span of three years
shows the mark of an ambitious and unrelenting personality, it was only
the beginning: Three years later, Kucinich ran for Congress as a
Democrat. He lost, but within two years the man who had defeated him,
Republican William E. Minshall, Jr., retired. Kucinich then ran again
for the seat. When he didn’t get the Democratic nomination for his
second attempt at Minshall’s seat, Kucinich ran as an independent.
He lost. Again. A few years passed, and then, readjusting his
sights, Kucinich ran for mayor of Cleveland. In that race, being the
stubbornly populist son of a Cleveland truck driver played to his
advantage. Kucinich won, becoming, at age 31, the youngest big-city
mayor in American history up to that time, and earning himself national
attention as the “Boy Mayor of Cleveland.” He proceeded to make more
history, not all of it the kind an ambitious young politician would
hope for. Most famously, in order to keep electricity rates low in his
city, Kucinich refused to sell off Cleveland’s municipal power company,
Muni Light, to a larger power company that was using all of its
political and economic leverage to try to force a sale. Although
Kucinich succeeded in his crusade against the larger power company, his
victory came at a very high price. To hang on to Muni Light, Cleveland
was forced to default on some of its bonds.
Because of this, under Kucinich’s tenure as mayor, Cleveland became
the first American city to go into financial default since the Great
Depression. (And this on top of some other notorious Kucinich
accomplishments: his banning of nuns from City Hall and his sacking of
a well-regarded police chief via press conference on Good
Friday—both of which probably contributed to his having to wear a
bulletproof vest to throw out the first pitch at an Indians game in
1978.) It will not surprise, then, that it was during this time that
Kucinich became tagged with his “Dennis the Menace” label—a
moniker that, consciously or not, Kucinich has succeeded in keeping in
circulation for nearly 30 years.
Kucinich himself has described his rocky mayoralty in Cleveland as
“absolute chaos,” and others have tended to agree. Due in large part to
his temperament while in office, he placed seventh on an authoritative
list of the 10 worst big-city mayors since 1820. While mayor, Kucinich
did manage to survive a recall attempt (by 200 votes), but when
reelection time came around in 1979, he was solidly defeated. He slunk
off to promote a French book written about his tenure, L’Enfant
Terrible de Cleveland, and told people he was working on a
novelized memoir about his experience.
Then came his 15 years of wandering in the political
wilderness—his time as a college lecturer; his stint as a TV
reporter; his flight to Los Angeles; his trouble paying his mortgage;
his friendship with the actress Shirley
MacLaine and with her
“spiritual facilitator,” Chris Griscom, whose Light Institute, located
near Santa Fe, New Mexico, listed Kucinich as a client in the 1990s,
according to a Washingtonian profile from the time. That
Washingtonian profile quoted the institute’s marketing
director as saying the Light Institute helps people “expand their
consciousness” and “get in touch with their inner child,” along with
helping them expand the “multidimensional and multi-
incarnational”
aspects of their identities.
In the Washingtonian profile, Kucinich laughed off a
question about whether he had come to believe in past lives, answering
the query with a joke about the many public reincarnations of some
politicians. What exactly Kucinich believes about reincarnation has
been a source of speculation ever since his Light Institute days, but
in the end, it probably doesn’t matter much (except to late-night
comics) whether, during his sojourn away from the campaign trail,
Kucinich was a student of actual
man-dies-and-comes-back-to-life-as-an-insect reincarnation, or just a
student of the more run-of-the-mill into-the-wilderness-and-back
political reincarnation. Something clearly worked.
In 1994, with big fundraising help from MacLaine, Kucinich began his
second political life, winning a seat in the Ohio State Senate. His
stock was on the rise as the passage of time vindicated him: It turned
out that Kucinich’s financial brinksmanship in the Muni Light affair
had saved Cleveland citizens millions of dollars. In his run for state
senate, his campaign posters featured a light bulb and the phrase,
“Because he was right.” When he ran for Congress, in 1996, his posters
said, “Light up Congress.” And in 1998, in a final bit of political
absolution, Kucinich was honored by the Cleveland City Council for
“having the courage and foresight” to hang on to Muni Light despite
paying the ultimate political price at the time.
When Kucinich talks today as if he is convinced that he will be
proven right eventually on every issue, and campaigns in New Hampshire
and other battleground states as if “Because he was right: Iraq
edition” will be a winning slogan at the presidential level, this
experience can’t be far from his mind.
Whether he’s just reliving glory days or is actually on to
something, there’s no doubt that Kucinich’s win in 1996 was a bona fide
moment of glory: His victory in that
congressional race was a high
point in his march back into public life, and also something of an
upset for Democrats at the national level. The seat representing Ohio’s
10th District, which includes Cleveland, had been held by a Republican
for two terms until Kucinich took it back.
He’s now held it through five elections. That doesn’t mean, however,
that he’s become more flexible or politically pragmatic in order to
make it through six terms in the House.
“Kucinich has lots of energy, he’s got a ton of ideas, and he’s a
little impatient with his colleagues,” said Congressman Jim McDermott,
who represents Seattle in the House and, like Kucinich, is considered
one of the body’s most liberal members. The Kucinich brand of
impatience, McDermott says, is that of someone who knows he’s right and
has never learned to tolerate the slow pace of political change.
“He’s a guy to take a risk,” McDermott told us. “I take some risks
myself, so I have respect for people who don’t sit and wait for the
pack to tell them to do something. But I think his timeline is a little
short for this process. I don’t disagree with an awful lot of what he’s
up to, but I think there are ways you might be more successful in
getting it done, that’s all. The suffering of fools is a talent, and
not everybody suffers fools gladly. He believes they ought to move more
quickly because this is only going to get worse.”
McDermott’s ambivalence sums up how a lot of people feel about
Kucinich. Right on many issues, but his rhetoric, his personal life,
and his way of getting from here to there turns people off. In polls,
that’s translating into disappointing finishes; a September poll in New
Hampshire found Kucinich getting just 3 percent of the Democratic
primary vote. And in terms of press coverage, it’s keeping Kucinich in
permanent afterthought status. In the spin room immediately after the
New Hampshire debate, the Kucinich station, like that of fellow “fringe
candidate” Mike Gravel, was completely ignored as reporters and
cameramen swarmed around spokespeople for the front-runners: Hillary
Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama. It took the personal
intervention of both Kucinich and his bombshell 29-year-old wife (his
third marriage) to draw a crowd, and even then it seemed that most of
the attention was due to the irresistibly funny photo-op the couple
offers.
Elizabeth Kucinich, the tongue-stud-wearing daughter of a lefty
British family, stands six feet tall without heels and looks like a
model. In the political realm, where the perception of the superficial
can be everything, the sight of such a woman with her arm around the
nerdy Kucinich (who is more than twice her age) tends to invite a lot
of thoughts about the candidate himself, some of them flattering, but
many of them unhelpful to Kucinich’s presidential
ambitions—thoughts about the insecurities of short men, for
example, or the historical tendency of American voters to prefer the
tallest guy in the presidential candidate lineup. But the sight of the
couple also invites a lot of double takes, the way seeing Grace Jones
with her arm around Al Gore would, and this is something the Kucinich
campaign clearly knows. (At a later debate in South Carolina, when
Senator Joseph Biden was asked to tell the audience what he likes best
about Kucinich, he looked at Kucinich and replied, with a smirk, “Your
wife.”) It’s also something the Kucinich campaign has learned to use to
its advantage.
At the New Hampshire debate, when Elizabeth entered the spin room
with Kucinich, the problem of his station being ignored was immediately
solved. Elizabeth was sporting a jeweled “PEACE” brooch pinned onto her
fitted black jacket, showing off perfectly manicured toes that could be
seen through the straps of her sleek, black high heels and, in a nod to
her potential first-lady status, wearing a string of pearls. She said
nothing, and didn’t have to, as the cameras snapped away and the
reporters pressed closer. When Kucinich defended his eyebrow-raising
debate statement that he wouldn’t give the order to “take out” Osama
bin Laden with a Hellfire missile (“A peaceful approach is that you
don’t use assassination,” Kucinich told a reporter), Elizabeth nodded,
wrapped one of her long arms around his waist, and squeezed him tighter
to her side. When he posed for pictures with her, he couldn’t wipe the
huge, shit-eating grin off his face.
Their love story is quintessential Kucinich. He met her when she
came to his office on Capitol Hill two years ago to discuss monetary
policy as part of her then-new job with the American Monetary
Institute—a job she’d taken after a stint at the House of Lords
in London, some time working in one of Mother Teresa’s homes for poor
children in India, and studies in religion and international conflict
resolution. At the time of their meeting, Elizabeth’s last name was
Harper, and the signature line on her e-mails included a quotation from
the film Kama Sutra: “Knowing love, I shall allow all things
to come and go, to be as supple as the wind and take everything that
comes with great courage. My heart is as open as the sky.”
Kucinich, who had been single for 20 years, and who, in 2003, had
told a political forum in New Hampshire that his perfect soul mate
would be “fearless in her desire for peace in the world and for
universal, single-payer health care,” found himself awestruck. After
the meeting, he phoned a friend and exclaimed that he’d met his future
wife. Elizabeth also had a love-at-first-sight moment. She later told
an interviewer for the Tampa Tribune that upon meeting
Kucinich, “I felt such hope for America. It made my heart sing.”
Shortly after their heart-stopping monetary-policy encounter,
Elizabeth sent Kucinich a business e-mail (including her Kama
Sutra signature line), and the two began an exchange that led them
to discover they would both be in New Mexico at the same time in the
near future. They had dinner, spent a night together at Shirley
MacLaine’s New Mexico home, and a few days later decided to get
married.
On the campaign trail, Elizabeth has been asked frequently about the
height and age differences between herself and her husband, but she
prefers to discuss their perfect spiritual union. As she told the
London Sunday Times in May: “Can you imagine what it would be
like to have real love in the White House and a true union between the
masculine and the feminine?”
Uh… sure, but only if we don’t have to imagine the physical
contortions involved in that height differential—or the White
House porters having to lift Kucinich up for a goodnight kiss.
Still, they do seem like a perfect match. In terms of loopy
statements related to Kucinich, hers about their “true union between
the masculine and the feminine” now rivals Kucinich’s own famous
statement about the universe’s “starlit magic” at an international
peace conference in Croatia in 2002.
“Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe,” he explained
to the conference crowd. “Matter transcends to return to spirit. The
interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the
outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the
innermost life of our self.”
Right. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Kucinich. But we’re not
convinced that your soul-light magic is going to move voters in
Iowa—and neither are those who follow
every last detail of
these races, even down to the appeal of the candidates’ wives.
Not long ago, the New York Times Sunday Styles section
devoted an entire article to the question of whether Republican Fred
Thompson’s beautiful, much younger wife would be viewed as a “trophy
wife,” and therefore become a political liability if he entered the
presidential race. That this question would even be explored in the
Times was a testament to the perception that Thompson was an
otherwise formidable candidate. In 2004, back when John Kerry was still
seen as a somewhat formidable presidential candidate, his wife, Teresa
Heinz Kerry, merited the same type of attention for her unfiltered
comments and potentially off-putting sophistication. But Elizabeth
Kucinich isn’t getting this kind of treatment. Hardly anyone is
ruminating on whether she’s viable as a general-
election campaign
spouse, because hardly anyone seriously believes that she and her
husband will make it to the general election.
Instead, Elizabeth Kucinich is treated mainly as someone who catches
the eye of people like Biden, and who doubles the comedic fodder that
her husband’s campaign appearances normally provide—as a joke
amplifier, in other words, rather than a message amplifier.
But hey, maybe in 15 years’ time, the Kuciniches will be proven
correct. Maybe we’ll all wake up one day and realize that matter does,
in fact, transcend into spirit, and think to ourselves: You know, a
true union between the masculine and the feminine is just what the
White House needs.
In reality, we are far likelier to be saying that about the third
and fourth terms of Bill and Hillary than about the first term of
Dennis
and Elizabeth. But still, you never know. Dennis Kucinich
could be right again. As he constantly reminds us: It’s happened
before.
There is one issue that Dennis Kucinich definitely hasn’t been right
on, at least as far as Democratic primary voters are concerned:
abortion.
He was raised Catholic, and apparently in his adulthood, even as his
mind opened to New-Age
notions and supposedly higher planes of
awareness, he remained convinced that a woman’s right to choose needed
to be severely restricted. In Congress, Kucinich was well aware that
this stance didn’t play well with his liberal base. He didn’t seem to
care, but he had enough political sense to try to keep his views
quiet.
In 2002, the Nation noted that one thing Kucinich wasn’t
mentioning on his website was his record on reproductive rights.
Without much notice, he’d become a darling of the National Right to
Life Committee, earning a zero percent favorable rating from NARAL
Pro-Choice America, and amassing a “Henry Hyde–like” anti-choice
voting record. You wouldn’t have known it back then from his online
presence; even now, Kucinich buries reproductive rights at the bottom
of the issues page on his campaign website and glosses over his past
anti-choice positions this way: “Most Americans, including myself, are
uncomfortable with abortions and feel there are too many of them.”
But the record is clear: As a congressman, Kucinich has voted to
prevent anyone but a parent from taking a teenage girl across state
lines for an abortion. He has voted in favor of banning late-term
abortions completely, with no exception for the health of the mother.
He also voted to make it a crime, punishable by up to two years in
prison, for doctors to perform late-term abortions. He opposed giving
federal workers coverage for contraceptives in their health-care plans.
He supported President Bush’s efforts to restrict the use of U.S.
family planning funds overseas. He opposed funding for stem-cell
research. In 1996, he told Planned Parenthood that he did not support
the substance of Roe v. Wade.
Kucinich claims to be pro-choice now, but as Markos Moulitsas, the
founder of the liberal blog DailyKos, noted with disgust on his website
earlier this year: “His transformation to being pro-choice happened
literally overnight—a week after he announced his 2004
presidential bid. One moment he was virulently anti-choice, the next he
was a staunch defender.”
Kucinich says that he “evolved.” But that supposed evolution
involves a flip-flop on abortion even bigger than Mitt Romney’s, and
strikes many as insincere and politically expedient. Moulitsas, for
example, might seem a natural ally of Kucinich since both opposed the
Iraq war, but Moulitsas can’t stomach Kucinich’s stances on abortion.
He’s written that he now responds to Kucinich’s name with one word:
“Ugh.”
When people tell Kucinich to his face that his chances of winning
this season’s Democratic nomination (much less the presidency) are slim
to none, he always refuses to go along with their skepticism. In April,
on Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher began his interview with
Kucinich by saying: “No one considers that you’re really going to win
this nomination.”
To which Kucinich replied: “Oh, I think I am.”
Maher stammered, dumbfounded—and after a long beat of silence,
there was a smattering of applause from the audience. But the effect
was to make Kucinich look crazy. He doesn’t really believe he’s going
to win, does he?
It’s a trap that Kucinich is caught in as a fringe candidate running
in his second long-shot race. If he concedes that he’s not going to win
(again), he has to explain why he’s there (again). Vanity? Publicity?
To make a symbolic point? Because he likes the great hotel rooms he and
Elizabeth get to stay in on the campaign trail? (Well, probably not
that last one, given that Kucinich had only raised about $1.1 million
as of July, about 57 times less than fundraising front-runner Hillary
Clinton had; in New Hampshire, they shared a room at a cheap Super 8
motel near the airport.)
On the flip side, if Kucinich pretends he’s actually got a serious
chance of winning, he looks, well, out of touch with reality, as he did
on Bill Maher—and someone who’s out of touch with
reality is not what Americans, Democrats or Republicans, are looking
for after eight years of George W. Bush.
On his show, Maher threw Kucinich a lifeline after telling him he
had no chance. “This is what I’m getting at: If you go through your
platform, it’s like, universal health care, ending the drug war,
getting serious about the environment, pulling out of Iraq right
away—I don’t know why you’re the crazy one, is what I’m saying.
It doesn’t seem radical to me.”
Why then, Maher wondered, wasn’t Kucinich polling higher?
“It’s only a matter of time,” Kucinich
replied.
It may be a matter of a very, very long time. It took Ohio 15 years
to come around and realize Kucinich was right about Muni Light. It’s
going to take Democrats more than two election cycles to see a vegan
peace candidate as electable to the presidency—if they ever do.
Democratic primary voters want a winner,
especially after the last
two elections.
So it doesn’t matter that Kucinich is in the right place on a lot of
progressive issues—even, belatedly, on abortion—or that he
has a lot of fans of his strident opposition to the North American Free
Trade Agreement, or that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
Greenspan, in his new book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a
New World, seems to validate Kucinich’s particular brand of
antiwar rhetoric, writing: “I am saddened that it is politically
inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is
largely about oil.” (The week the book was published, Kucinich crowed,
via press release: “I’ve been saying that for five years… Now, the
former Fed chairman corroborates that I’ve been right all along.”) It
also doesn’t matter that Kucinich has been making a lot of noise lately
about impeaching Cheney, even drawing Congressman McDermott in as a
cosponsor of the articles of impeachment he filed against the vice
president in the House earlier this year. And, in the end, it doesn’t
matter that Kucinich was right about invading Iraq when other Democrats
and a certain sex-advice columnist were wrong—even though, as
detractors have pointed out, Kucinich did vote in favor of removing
Saddam Hussein from power in 1998, back before he became the
unflinching “peace candidate” that he is now.
What matters is that Kucinich simply can’t win, and has done
nothing—in terms of fundraising, poll showings, crowd drawing, or
inspiring rhetoric—to demonstrate that he can.
Still, even if it’s not his first aim, he does serve one purpose in
the primary race. In a party that has long chafed at the rightward tilt
of its most marketable candidates, Kucinich, like Ralph Nader, helps to
draw the other Democrats’ rhetoric and campaign-trail promises back
toward the left. Even better, unlike Nader, Kucinich disappears after
the primary is over; as a successful Democratic congressman, Kucinich
can’t very well drop his party affiliation and run as an independent in
the general election, siphoning votes away from the chosen Democratic
candidate. In 2004, when he lost the race for the nomination, he
quietly went back to being a congressman, and he’s likely to do the
same this time around.
“There are a lot of politicians who try to get to the top by
compromising all the time,” says Congressman McDermott, who will not be
supporting Kucinich. “Dennis is going to make that real tough for the
others, because they’re going to be on the stage with a guy who’s
saying, ‘Hey, what about this?’ ‘What about that?’ ‘What are you
talking about?’ And to the extent that he does that, he has contributed
to the body politic something that needs to be there.”
But the reality of politics, McDermott said, is that electoral
success means compromise, and being right in the past on something like
a failed war that a majority of Americans initially backed doesn’t
necessarily make a good platform.
To illustrate this, McDermott told of taking his staff recently to
see one of his favorite statues in the U.S. Capitol. It’s a likeness of
Ernest Gruening, a Democratic senator from Alaska in the 1960s.
McDermott’s young staffers had no idea who Gruening was. Gruening,
McDermott pointedly explained, was one of two senators to vote against
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing the Vietnam war. Now he’s a
nobody.
Kucinich likes to remind everyone who will listen that he was right
to vote against the Iraq war, that he is somebody because of that, that
he should even be elected president because of that.
McDermott, who also voted against the Iraq war, sees it differently.
“The guys who had the perspicacity to see it can’t be upset by the fact
that nobody gives them credit for it,” he said.
Kucinich can and will be upset by this lack of credit. He seems
ready to run a whole primary campaign around his need for recognition
for being right on Iraq. He’s run this kind of campaign in the past, to
great success. But feelings about the Iraq war are not as settled in
this country as feelings about the Muni Light affair are in Cleveland.
A slogan like “Because he was right” might not even be enough for a
political rock star like Obama this season; given that, there’s not
much reason to think it will put Kucinich over the top.
Maybe some day Kucinich will get the credit he feels he deserves for
being among the few who were right about the Iraq war all along. Maybe
someone will build a statue of him somewhere. Perhaps it will even be
intended as a monument to his rightness about a disastrous war.
Perhaps, then, young people will be taken occasionally to view this
statue, and perhaps some wise older person will occasionally tell young
people who Kucinich was and, for a brief moment, before they forget
that they ever heard his name, these future voters will give Kucinich
what he so desperately craves: vindication.
But odds are better that Kucinich, like Gruening, will be a nobody
one day, too—and probably a lot sooner than he thinks. 
This piece is adapted from a profile of Dennis Kucinich, written
by Eli Sanders and Dan Savage, that will be published in November
in The Contenders, a book of profiles of the Democratic
presidential candidates. The book was put together by Seven Stories
Press, www.sevenstories.com.
