Rebecca Traister makes the case for Dennis Kucinich over on Salon, imploring, "[B]efore walking listlessly down the aisle toward our impending union with tepid centrism, let's rip our clothes off for one final, ill-advised fling with ideological honesty."
It's true, and I suspect many of you think it to yourselves, perhaps even confess it sotto voce to your loved ones during each Democratic debate (especially the ones where he doesn't mention the UFO): If the Democratic base pulled levers for the candidate whose policies best reflected its own beliefs, Dennis Kucinich should win his party's nomination in a landslide.
OK, sure, his reign as mayor of Cleveland was a mess. He has never passed a piece of legislation. He loves to flash peace signs that provoke flashbacks of your crazy Aunt Martha's annual Woodstock slide show. The fact that when you try to picture him at any sort of summit, you quickly envision Nicolas Sarkozy stealing his lunch money leads you to suspect that he might be an ineffective player on the world stage. He is a vegan. He has been compelled by his sense of honesty, and his close personal friendship with Shirley MacLaine, to disclose his encounters with extraterrestrial life. Also, he really does bear an unfortunate resemblance to a leprechaun. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Watching the Democratic debates last week, my housemates and I (all falling somewhere along the spectrum of "liberal," though I'm sure some of us are much more left than others) came to pretty unanimous conclusion that if we were willing to vote without making pragmatism central to our decision making process, we probably wouldn't vote for any of the top three contenders. More than one of the housemates voiced support for Dodd, and there were some strong arguments made for Richardson, too. None for Gravel or Kucinich to speak of, or at least not that were willing to speak up. But hey, polling my house makes for an unscientific survey to say the least. I'm just glad the other four are still in it at this point; with an election season this long, I'd expected more to drop before we even got to the primaries.
--Kate Sheppard
