The Optimist
By MARSHALL SELLA - New York Times
Marshall Sella is a contributing writer for the magazine.
Dennis Kucinich feels very much at home in California; people in sunny climes worship sunny gods. One balmy day finds him buzzing around the Old Courthouse in Santa Ana, in the heart of Orange County. It's a perfect Sunday afternoon, the kind of day when you just know you can be leader of the free world. The Ohio congressman has no doubt he will be president. Sitting in the courthouse during a 16-minute lunch between appearances, he enthusiastically pokes at my arm every which way to describe his coming triumph. He is scarfing down some of the vegan food that, he insists, makes him abnormally energetic. ''I have the ability to attract people who wouldn't normally vote in the primaries,'' he says fervently. ''I can touch people's hearts!''
He leans back in his chair for a millisecond of respite, which in his hyperkinetic world is sort of like a nap for him. ''I understand that some commentators want to winnow down the candidates in this race,'' he says, archly. ''It must be hard for them to live with such an awesome responsibility.''
Orange County is ostensibly Reagan Country, but there are 325 non-Republicans who turn out to hear the fiery congressman give his eight-minute stump speech. It's hard to tell what has unified them. Since Kucinich resides at the left of his party (to the point where Ralph Nader has threatened to run in 2004 if anyone but Kucinich is the Democratic nominee), it seems that every faction of the left has come out and tossed up an information stand of some sort. You can stroll by a rackety table marked ISRAEL HOLOCAUST AGAINST PALESTINE; another pleading with you to FREE THE CUBAN FIVE; and don't forget the COLOMBIA PEACE PROJECT. There are Greens, Socialists and New Agers of every stripe. To judge from the fashion tastes of the crowd, someone would be wise to set up a table selling muumuus.
Candidate Kucinich emerges to the expected fanfare. As he takes the stage and begins to speak, he lists ''the real weapons of mass destruction.'' While he does, children march out with cardboard cutouts in the shapes of bombs, but with the actual culprits scrawled on the cardboard: poverty, poor health care, poor education and so forth. Kucinich stands, absorbing the love in his rolled-up blue shirt sleeves. The crowd is treated to ''We Are the World''; kids holding the bomb shapes sway along with the music, as if poverty and its friends have joined Hands Across America.
Unlike the unpolished speakers who have gone before, Kucinich is a firebrand. He jabs the air at all the right moments; he rails against the administration's failure to find W.M.D., at its hideous lies, at the fact that it ''led this nation into a war under a pretense.''
''Bring our troops home,'' the candidate shouts. ''Louder!'' And the crowd replies in kind, 10 times over, each time louder than the last.
Dennis Kucinich is easy to like. He is attentive, articulate, impassioned. By all evidence he is also a preternaturally well read man. The bookshelf in his office is stubbornly diverse. There is Bob Woodward's ''Bush at War,'' Dr. Seuss's ''Horton Hears a Who!'' and the Koran. ''Prometheus Unbound,'' left lying casually on an end table, is opened to a page that reads, in part, ''I am as a drop of dew that dies.''
The candidate is not a wealthy man. He spent much of his early life hovering at the poverty level, living in 21 dwellings by age 17 (and two of those ''homes'' were cars). Today he estimates his net worth at ''something like $20,000 -- somewhere in the low zeroes.'' Say what you like about Kucinich; money has no draw for him. In politics, that's as near to evidence of possessing principles as one is likely to find.
But he is not commanding and he is not handsome. He is charismatic, but only up close. Even while giving a speech, he does not catch the eye -- and in high politics, that is a lowly crime. At 5-foot-7 inches, he is the shortest person in the race except for Carol Moseley Braun. When the media have not completely ignored Kucinich, they have mentioned his size. And though he typically caroms from questions about his height into how he and he alone can beat George W. Bush, his staff is irked to read articles in the Beltway pol sheets that list their man's height as a sole descriptor.
''You have to forgive me,'' Kucinich says. ''I'm used to leading because I'm short. It started off in school -- I led off all the processions because I was the shortest one. So this is just natural for me to think I'm gonna win!''
Optimism is central to the candidate's platform. His mantra regarding the war is ''U.N. in, U.S. out!'' He says he believes strongly that ''by eliminating Halliburton sweetheart deals'' and offering the U.N. sway over contracts, the international body is ready and able to slug its way back into the Sunni triangle. On the domestic side, he rails against corporate corruption at the slightest opportunity and favors single-payer health care, free and universal pre-kindergarten, free and universal college tuition at state schools. His pet project is the creation of a Department of Peace, which would redirect 1 percent of the Pentagon budget to somehow foster principles of nonviolence from the domestic level all the way into foreign policy. In one typical speech last month, he said, ''I am running for president of the United States to enable the goddess of peace to encircle within her arms all the children of this country and all the children of the world.''
This might seem naive. But Kucinich is not at home to negativity; his career is about hope, and the End of All War is just around the corner. So, as day must follow night, his campaign is about to catch fire. ''Look, I could take a 40-foot shot at the buzzer and make it!'' he tells me frenetically in his office. ''My specialty was always taking the long set shots. And they go swiiish! Tell me how many notes I have, and I'll name that tune!''
''Do you see yourself as a centrist?'' I ask.
''Ab-so-lute-ly!'' he cries, at alarming volume. ''Look, I'm mainstream. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio!''
nelectability brings with it certain perks. In a debate in Detroit this fall, the moderator Gwen Ifill quite bluntly offered the nine candidates ''the rap'' on each of them. She told Senator John Kerry that the conventional wisdom on him was that he was ''kind of a Northeastern, liberal elitist and that you have some problem connecting with people''; she asked Representative Richard Gephardt if his ''moment [had] passed,'' eliciting boos from the crowd.
But Kucinich was offered far sweeter music. The last member of the House who was elected directly to the presidency, Ifill said, was Abraham Lincoln. The rap that even some Kucinich supporters see him as unelectable and ''strange'' -- simply too far left to win in 2004 -- would have been too severe to broach. Naturally, Kucinich hit this Little League pitch out of the park, even seizing on the gaffe that Ifill's premise was incorrect; James Garfield made the same leap, from the big room to the little oval one. Better, Garfield lived in the same county where Kucinich grew up. In presidential-debate terms, this was a wedding gift. Still, what harm did it do? Why garrote a man who is polling, no matter where you look, between 1 and 3 percent -- somewhere between Carol Moseley Braun and lint?
Of course, all of this can change in 24 hours. But each campaign, in its early days, includes a small cadre of sure losers, quixotic men and women of vision who are ''in this race till the end'' and who insist, when things get dark, that ''the only poll that counts is the one on Election Day!'' That phrase is as routine to a faltering campaign as ''O Death, where is thy sting?'' is to an English funeral. The Unelectables dash from rally to rally, seeing only people who have come out to see them, and thus knowing in their hearts that the pollsters have it all wrong. Until that one frosty day in Iowa or New Hampshire when grim reality sets in. The Unelectable's numbers are still plummeting, and the money is gone. A second phase of the race begins, in which he or she becomes ''an agenda candidate,'' slugging it out only ''to influence the debate.''
Dennis Kucinich has no intention of experiencing the second phase. ''I have a genuine grass-roots following,'' he says comfortably. ''Forests that are not being written about, but are still growing.''
As a force in the campaign, Image bears a scythe, and often swings its weapon early, never mind that the dead manage to keep on running for months. It's a glaring truism that Americans don't vote solely on issues. Could anyone truly imagine the late -- and immensely skilled -- Paul Tsongas fidgeting through the oath of office? What about Senator Phil Gramm, who brayed about wanting to be ''perzident'' and made the current president's dialect sound like Peter O'Toole's? Or H. Ross Perot, whose alien leaders seem to have botched his design before sending him to our world?
The political historian Douglas Brinkley is encyclopedic on the subject of image-making in politics: how the system has always been about image. ''When George Washington entered a room,'' Brinkley says, ''he was imposing. And that got around -- by word of mouth as well as in the form of engravings and illustrations in the press. Jefferson was always characterized as 'tall, redheaded and handsome,' and that made a real difference.''
The patron saint of Image for the Democrats, after all these years, remains John F. Kennedy. There was an easy elegance about J.F.K. that seemed to transmit self-assuredness -- and that's wartime chocolate to anyone who seeks to occupy the highest office in the land. Accordingly, John F. Kerry has half-jokingly played up his initials. And the only haircut in the race more like Kennedy's than Kerry's belongs to Senator John Edwards, whose look could not be more like J.F.K.'s without the intervention of plastic surgeons.
On the other hand, small-stature candidates like Dennis Kucinich, wherever they live in the political spectrum, cannot look in the mirror and see Jack Kennedy. They don't enjoy that empirical luxury. They see Bobby Kennedy. R.F.K., who was 5-foot-9, used body language the way F.D.R. used his voice to assert political heft. Like Kucinich, he was flinty and knew how to hit the back wall of any arena with his rhetoric. Unlike Kucinich, he benefited from having worked at the highest levels of government during times of crisis; he had height by association; and he had a type of charisma that people still write books about.
Brinkley's take on Dennis Kucinich is not optimistic. ''He's a product of a 1960's version of masculinity,'' he says, ''when heroic males were people like John Lennon and Bob Dylan. It was a kind of gender-blend -- and a countercultural one. But the counterculture doesn't elect presidents; the culture still does.''
Dennis Kucinich knew he wanted to slog into public service, he says, in ninth grade, as he listened to J.F.K.'s inaugural address. ''When he said, 'The torch has been passed to a new generation,' I thought he was talking about me!''
I gently point out that the rest of that speech was quite hawkish -- significantly darker than any of Kucinich's ''goddess of peace'' offerings.
''Well, that's true,'' he says, laughing, ''but selective memory being what it is, that's what led me to public service.''
In 10th grade, Kucinich set his ambitions down on paper. He still has a homework autobiography in which he let his intention be known: ''My main ambition is and will be a career in national politics, and I'm going to aim for the top.'' Just before the word ''top,'' he has careted in the word ''very.''
In the wild -- darting around Orange County, for example -- Kucinich has become accustomed to addressing true believers, and true believers are the ultimate political aphrodisiac. He has adopted a strategy to circumvent all the reporters who have so studiously ignored him. So he boasts celebrity endorsements from Ed Asner, Willie Nelson and a bevy of others. That, he would like to believe, is the surest path to a grass-roots stunner. Still, even some supporters are not waiting for Kucinich to rocket upward in the polls. The actor Peter Coyote, who backs both Kucinich and Howard Dean, has said: ''Kucinich is probably more progressive on a spectrum of issues, which is why I'm supporting him -- but my suspicion is that he might be a little strange and far out for America. This is not a left-wing country.''
Other celebrities are less conflicted. In Santa Ana, after Kucinich finishes his speech, the singer Michelle Shocked shows up to perform. For a time, she wanders around looking for something and is heard rather hotly using the phrase ''artistic integrity.'' No amplifier has been provided, and because she plays electric guitar, this may be a problem. The candidate steps outside through the courthouse's glass door to solve the problem; his contributors, milling around inside, are then treated to a surreal dumb show as Shocked gesticulates angrily to him and Kucinich summons all his pacifistic skills and abilities.
Shocked is appeased and agrees to sing, a tune that is meant to catch the spirit of the day. It's a song about Vietnam: ''Tonight there are 50,000 gone. . . . '' Afterward, she turns to the little girl whose hair she has been stroking during the tune, then asks, ''If you were old enough to vote, who would you vote for?''
It's an invaluable bit of information for the dwindling crowd. The girl, adorable on cue, replies: ''Dennid Ducinidh!''
In rallies the rest of the day, Dennid Ducinidh knocks 'em dead. A speech at Leisure World, a vast retirement community, draws 450 people, and Kucinich is at the top of his game. Afterward, impressed seniors plod their way to the exits. Two 70-ish women, who look startlingly alike, exchange happy noises about the evening. Still, they have a few doubts.
''His name's not known,'' one says distantly.
The other woman can top that theory. She whispers, ''He's very small!''
Two months later, back in Washington, Kucinich gives no sign that he sees the wheels flying off his campaign. But a few clues have crept in. He looks haggard and out of sorts. The fire-eater with the schoolboy haircut has been replaced by the overworked, politely irritated congressman with the schoolboy haircut. Facts are facts, and his poll numbers haven't budged.
Arriving late to his office, Kucinich seems 60 days more embittered by his lack of exposure. ''I'm not someone who spends time complaining about the media,'' he says, starting a set piece I've heard before in which he complains about the media. ''But what's interesting is that anyone who follows me on the campaign trail sees the response I get from audiences large and small. The fact that it's not reflected in the coverage paves the way for me to be an overnight success, a surprise story in the early primaries. The only poll that counts is the one that's on Election Day.''
''The only poll that counts,'' I mutter. ''Isn't that what candidates say when they're way down in the polls?''
''There's a difference,'' Kucinich shoots back, warding off the curse with a flat palm. ''There are only two candidates in this race who have national grass-roots organizations: me and Howard Dean. To the extent that he has one. But I have staying power -- a real strong following.''
Despite whatever dark ideas, at long last, might be taking shape in Kucinich's mind about his odds, he has lost none of his optimistic flourishes. ''The whole world is waiting for an American president who will heal the wounds that have occurred,'' he says. ''We're on the threshold of a new era, where fear ends and hope begins!''
When I suggest that critics dismiss this as rainbows-and-unicorns rhetoric, he replies, a bit peevishly, ''Oh, really?'' before selecting a semi-relevant defense. ''I followed the genesis of this war, followed it on a daily basis. I am not new to these issues. I have a political career since 1967.''
But the contentiousness seems to jump-start his optimism. ''I think presidents who succumb to self-fulfilling prophecies of war only do so because hope has died within their own hearts.''
Still, even if one rejects the word ''terrorist,'' there are those who aspire to kill Americans in . . . well, name a country. I try to measure Kucinich's stance toward Al Qaeda with an easy hypothetical: ''You locate a known terrorist cell in Pakistan. Do you dispatch troops to kill them?''
Knees together, hands folded primly, he first replies by saying that he would ''work cooperatively to meet that challenge.'' I rephrase the question a few times -- but he knows what I'm getting at, and resists this notion of killing, which is the duty of a pacifistic man. Eventually he lands on the idea that killing a terrorist would be unavoidable if the ''arresting officers'' came under threat. ''Look,'' he says equably. ''In the rules of engagement, it's a policeman's right to fire back, to uphold the law.''
''This is why the 'rap' on you has nothing to do with James Garfield,'' I say. ''You have the Neville Chamberlain rap.''
Kucinich takes this very much in stride. ''There's only an advantage here if all nations work together,'' he counters. ''I think we're at the threshold where war is going to be archaic.
''The point is, I have a genuine, mainstream message,'' he adds, by all evidence believing this. ''There's no question that if I get coverage, I'll rise in the polls. And interestingly, the lack of media coverage has started to become such an issue that the media is covering it!''
He pauses. ''Inevitably,'' he says, staring hopefully at the ceiling, ''Americans would appreciate having a president with perseverance.''
Now, there's something new. I tell him that's the first time I've ever heard him use that conditional tense: ''would'' instead of ''will.''
He blinks twice and corrects himself. ''Will. Will appreciate.'' |
