Challenging Bush: Past Defeat and Personal Quest Shape
Long-Shot Kucinich Bid
January 2, 2004
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 - Dennis J. Kucinich was 33 when, having
been drummed out of the Cleveland mayor's office, he set
out on what he calls his "quest for meaning." His city was
in financial default - the embarrassment of the nation. His
political career was in tatters, his bank account
dangerously low. Not even the radio talk shows would hire
him.
So he left the Rust Belt in the winter of 1979, headed west
to California and, eventually, New Mexico, to write and
think. There, in the austere beauty of the desert outside
Santa Fe, he sought out a spiritual healer who, he says,
led him on a path toward inner peace. "That," Mr. Kucinich
said, "is where I discovered that war is not inevitable."
Now, after a stunning political comeback that culminated
with his election to the House of Representatives in 1996,
Mr. Kucinich - the boy mayor who was so bombastic he fired
his police chief live on the 6 o'clock news - is seeking
the White House, on a platform of "nonviolence as an
organizing principle of society." He wants to pull out of
Iraq, sharply reduce the Pentagon budget and establish a
cabinet-level Department of Peace.
At 57, he keeps to a strict vegan diet; on a cold December
night in Cleveland, Mr. Kucinich padded about his kitchen
in stocking feet - no shoes are allowed in the Kucinich
home - and ate Chinese bean curd for dinner. He is twice
divorced but open to a new relationship, even going so far
as to advertise his availability during a candidates'
debate. His campaign manager is a "transformational
kinesiologist" - a practitioner of the healing arts - who
has never before worked in politics.
As he hopscotches around the country, delivering speeches
that blend the themes of John Lennon with an ardent defense
of the working class, Mr. Kucinich - a slim man at
5-foot-7, 135 pounds - has become the boutique candidate
for peace activists and Hollywood liberals. Willie Nelson
and Bonnie Raitt are the headliners of a fund-raiser
concert for him this week. Ed Asner, the actor, likens Mr.
Kucinich to "a prophet speaking the truth."
Yet his poll numbers are in the single digits, and not one
member of his own Ohio Congressional delegation has
endorsed him. He has raised $5 million, vastly more than
the Rev. Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, but a
pittance compared to the $40 million raised by Howard Dean.
Still Mr. Kucinich runs, perhaps because that is all he
knows how to do. Perhaps it fulfills his belief, held since
boyhood, that the White House is his destiny. Or perhaps,
those who know him say, Mr. Kucinich runs out of a
deep-seated desire - forged as the eldest of seven children
in a desperately poor family - to rise above his roots.
"I think he has had to fight a terrible emptiness that many
of us have been blessed not to have," said Tim Hagan, a
former Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio who has
known Mr. Kucinich for 30 years. "I think that's what
drives him. He is driven by a sense of affirming to the
world that he counts, that his voice should be heard, that
he is somebody to be taken with real seriousness."
That he does not seem to stand a chance does not faze Mr.
Kucinich. He is convinced, he says, that there is "a
readiness on the part of the electorate to embrace" his
vision for America, if only they have an opportunity to
hear it. No matter that voters outside the ethnic wards of
Cleveland can barely pronounce his Croatian surname. (It is
pronounced koo-SIN-itch.)
The candidate says they will learn.
"I make the
impossible possible," he told a radio interviewer in
Houston, from the cellphone in his kitchen that cold
December night. "That's what I specialize in."
Setting a Goal
St. John Cantius School, a tiny Roman
Catholic high school on Cleveland's west side, has been
shuttered for years now, a victim of declining enrollment.
Lorene Wolski Mihalko remembers the first day she saw
Dennis Kucinich there, at their freshman induction ceremony
in the fall of 1960, a sprite of a boy delivering "the most
dynamic speech" she had ever heard.
"He looked," Mrs. Mihalko said, "like he was 9 years old."
He was the kind of kid who threw himself into everything.
He played basketball, and, at 4-foot-9, 97 pounds,
third-string quarterback. ("I was the football," Mr.
Kucinich says.) He was an editor of the school newspaper, a
member of the debate team, a candidate for student council
president, one of many races he would lose.
Yet by the time he was a senior, young Dennis Kucinich was
declaring he would be president one day. Once, he told his
best friend, Dan Backus, he would be mayor of Cleveland by
the time he was 30. "He always had a plan," Mr. Backus
said.
If Mr. Kucinich immersed himself in school, perhaps it was
because life at home was so difficult. His father, Frank, a
truck driver, and mother, Virginia, struggled to make ends
meet. By the time he was 17, Mr. Kucinich had lived in 21
places, including an orphanage, where he and his siblings
spent Christmas one year while their mother fought
post-partum depression. Between apartments, the family
stayed in a car.
"The car," Mr. Kucinich recalled, "was parked near a
Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. My mother would go down to the
store and ask them to heat up a bottle for the baby. We'd
go to a delicatessen and buy processed foods and come back
and eat. My dad was trying to keep working. It was total
chaos."
Out of that chaos came a populist streak that has
characterized Mr. Kucinich's career since he first ran for
office in 1967 at age 21, taking on a veteran City Council
member. He pulls out his union card - he is a member of the
cameramen's union - every chance he gets. As president, he
says, he would withdraw from the North American Free Trade
Agreement and the World Trade Organization. He advocates
universal health care, through a single-payer system.
Mr. Kucinich lost that first race. But a decade later in
1977, after a stint as Cleveland's clerk of courts, Mr.
Kucinich's boyhood prediction to Mr. Backus just about came
true. At 31, he became the youngest mayor of any major
American city.
The nation knew him as "the boy mayor." But in Cleveland,
he was Dennis the Menace, impetuous to a fault, surrounded
by aides who were young and arrogant and ready for a fight.
By August 1978 he had narrowly survived a recall.
"When Dennis would take on a fight, he saw things in terms
of good and evil," said Joseph Tegreene, who served as Mr.
Kucinich's finance director and had such a bitter falling
out with his old boss that they did not speak to each other
for 15 years.
The blowup that cost Mr. Kucinich his job was a showdown
with Cleveland's banks and the City Council over the city's
public utility company, known as Muny Light. The banks,
holding city loans, demanded the mayor sell Muny Light. Mr.
Kucinich refused; Cleveland went into default. In November
1979, voters turned him out of office. Thus began what the
congressman describes as a period of "almost relentless
reflection" into the deepest corners of his life, and why
it was so filled with conflict.
"I never had the time to do that before," Mr. Kucinich
said. "The people of Cleveland gave me something I never
gave myself: time off."
He began by going to California, where he turned to a
friend, Shirley MacLaine, the actress known for her
excursions into the metaphysical. She introduced Mr.
Kucinich to Christine Griscom, a self-described spiritual
teacher and healer whose Light Institute in Galisteo, N.M.,
promises "multi-incarnational exploration" and "access to
your higher self."
"Chris is the person who has really worked on matters
relating to peace, both inner peace and peace in the
world," Mr. Kucinich said. "I met her and began a series of
discussions on the nature of life, truth, purpose."
That conversation, Ms. Griscom said, continues today; she
and Mr. Kucinich have discussed matters like abortion and
Iraq. "He comes to New Mexico to contemplate, regenerate
himself, but he always brings the world with him," Ms.
Griscom said. "He doesn't come here for retreat. Dennis
doesn't know what that word means."
His political exile was as difficult personally as it was
professionally. His second marriage (his first had ended in
divorce) broke up in 1986, five years after the birth of
his daughter. With a master's degree in communications, Mr.
Kucinich supported himself by lecturing and consulting, but
he was desperate to get back into politics.
"But every time I tried," Mr. Kucinich said, "I couldn't
win."
A Career Revival
His big break came in 1993. A reporter for The Cleveland
Plain Dealer was investigating Mr. Kucinich's decision not
to sell Muny Light, and concluded that the move benefited
consumers. Mr. Kucinich was "on a beach in Malibu, watching
the dolphins play," he said, when the reporter called for
his comment.
With a light bulb as his logo and the slogan "Because he
was right," Mr. Kucinich won election to the Ohio Senate in
1994, and the United States House in 1996.
After 15 years in the political wilderness, the boy mayor -
calmer, less impetuous, as determined as ever - was back.
On Feb. 17, 2002, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich,
Democrat of Ohio, was a featured speaker at a conference
sponsored by the Southern California Americans for
Democratic Action. As co-chairman of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus, Mr. Kucinich had made a name for
himself as an outspoken foe of what he sees as the Bush
administration's bellicose foreign policy.
One thousand people packed a hall at the University of
Southern California to hear him attack the war in
Afghanistan and the buildup to war in Iraq, the primary
antiterrorism legislation and the treatment of detainees at
Guantánamo Bay.
The "prayer for America" speech, as Mr. Kucinich called it,
was, like many of his speeches, long on passion and short
on policy specifics. But to people in the hall, it was
electrifying.
"It was like someone singing opera," said Judith Bustany,
president of Southern California Americans for Democratic
Action.
Soon, peace activists were pressing Mr. Kucinich to run for
the White House.
"The response," Mr. Kucinich said, "was something I never
could have predicted." He decided 2004 was his year.
On the Campaign Trail
This is what the Kucinich for
president campaign looks like:
The candidate is jammed into the backseat of a little red
Honda at 9:30 p.m. on a bitter cold night in Cleveland,
cellphone pressed to his ear, telling yet another radio
interviewer how he is the only candidate who has actually
voted against the war in Iraq. He ends, as he always does,
saying "how grateful" he is for the opportunity to express
his views.
On a swing through New Hampshire, Mr. Kucinich is invited
to address union members - whom he calls "brothers and
sisters" - at a low-slung wood-paneled hall outside
Manchester. Burly men in union jackets usher him into a
holding room while his rival Howard Dean is rushed to the
podium like some kind of rock star. Mr. Kucinich shrugs off
the indignity, saying he came a little ahead of schedule.
It would be easy to dismiss Mr. Kucinich as nothing more
than a vanity candidate, to mock his veganism and his
relationship with Shirley MacLaine, and some do. One member
of Congress, a Republican, called him "a flake." A
Democrat, more charitably, described him as a loner, "a
solo guy."
But those who know Mr. Kucinich best insist he is a serious
man with serious ideas, who believes with every fiber of
his being that it is his obligation, his duty, to offer his
vision for repairing the world.
"He's a good politician, and he knows that in this country,
people vote their pocketbook," said Paul Tipps, a lobbyist
in Columbus who has known Mr. Kucinich for decades. "But
that doesn't mean that Dennis has to campaign for their
pocketbook. He's willing to campaign for their hearts and
their minds."
There is almost an ascetic quality about Mr. Kucinich; his
home, in a forlorn, working-class section on Cleveland's
west side, is so sparsely furnished as to be practically
bare. He appears to have little life outside his work. He
had a girlfriend for eight years, a Cleveland lawyer two
decades his junior, who, he said, remains "very important
to me." But the relationship broke off because "the
partnership stuff was just too hard."
Some say Mr. Kucinich runs because there is no reason not
to. His campaign has elevated his name recognition, which
could come in handy if he decides to seek the Ohio
governor's office or run for the Senate. Besides that, Mr.
Kucinich clearly enjoys being on the campaign trail and has
raised enough money to do so.
"He doesn't need a lot of money," said Jerry Austin, an
Ohio Democratic campaign consultant. "He stays in Motel 6's
and takes Southwest Airlines. He'll stay in as long as he
can afford to get from one place to another, because he
wants to be heard."
Running, though, has not been without its costs. A longtime
opponent of abortion, Mr. Kucinich now supports Roe v.
Wade, a decision he says he reached after consulting with
"the women in my life." That, plus his firm embrace of gay
marriage, has put him at odds with many voters in his
largely Roman Catholic district.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Kucinich is constantly asked
when he will pull out of the race. The questions irritate
him, and he has lately taken to berating the media for
focusing only on polls and money.
But he still seems aware of the challenge he faces. At a
fund-raiser in an Italian restaurant in Cleveland's
downtown, the Ohio primary, in March, was on his mind. He
swept into the room and stood on a chair, delivering a
brief speech that, in its simplicity, perfectly summed up
his campaign.
"We are in a position in this room to redirect the future
of this country," Mr. Kucinich said, to much applause.
"But," he added, "we've got to deliver Ohio."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company