The Audaciousness of Dennis Kucinich

It is hard to believe that it was 30 years ago this month that Dennis Kucinich realized his dream of becoming mayor of Cleveland.

Kucinich toiled 10 years to become mayor. Yet he kicked it away in a very short time.

Now, he is spending a decade fighting to realize another dream, - to be President of the United States of America.

I’ve known Dennis for many years. Been a fan and been a critic.

As I’ve written before, he was running copy when I was at the Plain Dealer in the mid-1960s and he was the copyboy, as they were called in those days, at the Wall Street Journal bureau when I was with the Journal. (I am likely wrong about the copyboy label at the Wall Street Journal. Dennis, in his new book, “The Courage to Survive” about his first 22 years of life, says his job was as a copy reader.)

I walked the streets of the Tremont area with him in 1967 on his first run for office. As we left one house, Dennis said, “If I win this one, I can go all the way.” I remember stopping and asking Dennis what he meant by “all the way.” Of course, I knew what he meant. I wanted to hear him say it. He brushed it off, saying that I didn’t have to print that.

Dennis wasn’t yet 21-years old. He became eligible to vote by Election Day. He lost that election only to return two years later to win that seat.

Now, 40 years after that walk, his dream is still alive.

Dennis has touched the nerve of leadership-deprived activists nationally today just as he did in Cleveland years ago – by poking his finger into the chests of the powerful with demands no one else would make.

He has not changed much.

I left the Wall Street Journal in 1968, pushed away from conventional journalism by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

Instead, I covered Cleveland city hall for more than 30 years, writing in a self-published newsletter every other week.

I closely followed the pressure cooker days of the Kucinich administration. The good and the bad, and there were both.

Was there a Cleveland business cabal to take down Dennis?

No doubt about it. Their desires were articulated in war-like jargon in a Fortune Magazine article.

Here’s how Fortune assessed the actions of Cleveland business leaders in an article, “How Business Bosses Saved a Sick City,” March 1989:

“E. Mandell de Windt, the now retired chairman of Eaton Corp. and dean of Cleveland businessmen, organized the troops and devised a strategy, setting in motion a benign conspiracy of executives and entrepreneurs that still operates.

“The impressive feat of organizing that cabal and persuading Cleveland’s most senior businessmen to take charge of the grittiest aspects of civic life was the real key to the town’s turnaround,” the Fortune article continued. (Turnaround? Cleveland in two of the last three years was rated the most impoverished American city.)

A cabal to overthrow an elected government.

The article quoted a top Cleveland lawyer from Jones & Day saying, “In a sense, Kucinich was the best thing that ever happened because he was a unifying element. People looked at him and said, ‘Enough is enough here. Let’s get together and change things.’”

Truth was that the business establishment, along with the city’s two newspapers, Plain Dealer, which had endorsed him, and Press, were trying to destabilize Kucinich during most of his two-year term.

I wrote in July of 1979: “Mayor Dennis Kucinich plunged a bare hand into the pulsating hornet’s nest when he opposed Cleveland’s business establishment on four major economic issues close to the heart of Corporate Cleveland. The result has been a bitter, open war with unconditional surrender the only path to ‘peace.’” Two of the major issues were tax abatements and control of the city’s electric power system.

The article presented a chart of 88 Cleveland business and lawyers and their interlocking interests. Almost half of them, for example, had contributed financially to the recall campaign against Kucinich a year earlier.

However, there were times when you had to question the quality of his character.

The public battle Kucinich carried on with Richard Hongisto led to the attempt to recall Dennis. Kucinich had recruited Hongisto from San Francisco where he had been county sheriff. He had earned significant progressive credentials. He thwarted a court order and went to jail rather than remove elderly people from a hotel,

Hongisto, however, became too close and popular with the Cleveland Police and the news media. This made Kucinich uncomfortable. Hongisto also made charges against the administration, which led to showdown.

Kucinich - before live TV cameras - fired Hongisto. He came across as harsh and dictatorial. Hongisto kept a calm attitude in sharp contrast.

I wrote at the time in Point of View: “One man – Hongisto – has shaken the Kucinich Administration to the very foundation by serving as a focal point for bitter resentment against a City Hall operated by codes of punishment and intimidation.

“Hongisto’s charges – none so solid or dramatic to cause a major crisis – have been so destructive because they build upon a four-month Administration record of being willing to steamroller almost anyone for good or no reason.

“The administration has created a climate of fear and resentment. It caught the backlash.”

After the firing, Hongisto told reporters in front of City Hall: “I could have managed to save my job, to bow out gracefully. But, in fact, the truth is that I thought back several years ago to the stories about people who once knew Richard Nixon and how he trod over people and rose to become President and I could not in good conscience participate in watching the growth and development of a parallel career.”

It’s curious that Hongisto saw Kucinich as a potential Presidential candidate back in 1978.

Kucinich, despite his near perfect positions on progressive issues, sent out other worrisome signals. His actions often divided progressives here.

Kucinich once patrolled a neighborhood with his bodyguard, and observed some kids playing in an empty pool. Instead of a friendly scare and warning about possible vandalism, Kucinich chose to make an arrest. He called for another patrol car to take the boys to jail. One of the youths was 7-years old, a fact that a friendly talk would have revealed to the Mayor. (Hongisto gained popular acclaim when he went out on patrol and made arrests, possibly Kucinich’s motive for doing likewise.)

On another occasion, protesting elderly citizens, led by a Catholic organizing group, came to City Hall, demanding a meeting with Kucinich. Some of them were lame and in wheel chairs. Kucinich, rather than leaving his office, one floor up, sneaked out of City Hall. He then informed the group that he would meet them across the street at the city’s Convention Center. The charade angered people who should have been strong supporters.

He also split progressives on issues of race. (See reprint of article below.)

One supporter with a long record of left activism broke with Kucinich. He said, “I have never encountered anywhere the contempt that they have for people, not even among Southern cracker sheriffs who wanted to kill me.”

Kucinich now presents a figure that attracts the same progressive factions nationally as he once did in Cleveland.

He is seen as the most honest of politicians as he clearly states positions others fear to voice. He steadfastly opposes the war in Iraq, for example.

He positions himself similarly to his posture in the final days of his campaign for mayor in 1977. In a stiff battle with Edward Feighan, who later became a Congressman from Cleveland, Kucinich promised anything voters asked.

Kucinich had a line – “You want it, you got it” – to voter demands in the waning days of the campaign. He won by fewer than 3,000 of 180,000 votes.

It isn’t much different from stances he takes to lure progressive voters now. He offers, however, what he cannot deliver. He can afford to be inflexible since he does not have enough support to be a real factor in the campaign. However, he can make other Democrats look weak and waffling with his unwavering positions in the many televised debates of this campaign.

The dilemma for those who see the tremendous potential of Dennis Kucinich – particularly as a spokesperson for the economic interests of the working and middle class – is the gnawing reminder that Dennis will do almost anything for power.

The audacity of a go-it-alone Kucinich is that he can take courageous stands because there is no potential of his losing anything. Since he registers in the low single digits in national polls, he can afford to go where no others will tread.

He plays the hero role skillfully.

The following article was written for the Cleveland Edition November 15, 1984:

When the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Cleveland this month he made a trip to City Hall and spoke in the City Council chambers. He sat in the seat usually reserved for Council President George Forbes on Mondays.

Forbes took the seat to his left. The seat to his right remained free as the room began to fill with council members, the press and others straining to see the celebrity of the 1984 presidential primary season.

Jackson looked out at the nearly full committee hearing room and spotted Dennis Kucinich sitting in the audience. “Come on up here, Dennis,” Jackson motioned to the city councilman and former mayor.

A smiling Dennis Kucinich literally hopped to Jackson’s right, sitting where TV and other cameras focused on him, Jesse and George.

Dennis then promised to help slice away at Jackson’s $1 million campaign debt; brother Gary Kucinich, also a councilman, offered Jackson help on a crusade to get food to those starving in Ethiopia.

“That won’t do much good for Dennis along Fleet and Broadway,” suggested a councilman, referring to Dennis’ strongest political base, which is primarily white, ethnic working-class.

But ironically, Jesse and Dennis have lots in common as politicians.

No local politician so touched the nerve of leadership-starved, left-leaning activists as did Dennis Kucinich when he became the youngest mayor of Cleveland in 1977. A willing symbol of anti-corporate resistance, he, not unlike Jackson, unabashedly pushed his way onto the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers and nudged his image onto national television, even luring the late night Tom Snyder television show to his then favorite working-class symbol, Tony’s Diner.

Kucinich attracted attention by doing the unexpected - mostly poking his finger into the belly and face of Cleveland’s strong, but stodgy, corporate leadership and getting the expected response – typical arrogance that plunged the city into default, giving Dennis the sympathetic underdog image of a national urban hero. That image may be cloudy at home, but Kucinich is counting on its being alive outside Cleveland.

“I’m a national politician,” says Kucinich, despite the fact that his comeback politically was as a councilman of Ward 12. He’s probably more right than wrong, however, because of his relentless persistence to advance toward a goal, regardless of the impediments.

“You wouldn’t run against an incumbent Democrat, would you?” Kucinich was asked. He’s rumored to be ready to challenge former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Glenn, whose Senate term expires in 1986.

“I don’t look at it that way,” he said.

But an incumbent is an incumbent, Dennis.

“I don’t look at it that way,” repeated Kucinich, who often speaks in riddles when he doesn’t want to answer.

There are some who believe Glenn will not run in 1986. A Republican political strategist says that Glenn’s biggest contributors seriously doubt that Glenn will run after clearing up his heavy debt from the presidential try.

Hardly a Kucinich supporter, he says the Senate would be a perfect spot for Kucinich, who, he predicts, would immediately begin establishing a national reputation for even higher office.

Kucinich is now traveling Ohio twice a week, speaking in places like Mingo Junction, making no pretense of not being interested in a statewide run. He could run against Glenn even as a dress rehearsal for a real run in 1988 when Sen. Howard Metzenbaum is expected to retire.

In any case, Kucinich has the uncanny ability to set his sights far into the future, meanwhile preserving his position at home where the demands are often different from a statewide campaign.

His appearance with Jackson symbolizes a problem Kucinich has had throughout his political career in Cleveland, a city drenched in racial politics. A solid base among white ethnic working-class people has often presented Kucinich with choices of using racial tactics or losing his iron grip on that constituency.

His hero status among activist and even many radicals nationally conflicts with his local Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde reputation, dividing on economic and social issues, particularly on racial matters.

The separation of economic vs. social issues was clearly enunciated by Kucinich in a speech he made as mayor. He outlined his philosophy to the National Press Club in Washington D. C.: “You may have noticed that I didn’t touch on any of the great debates over social issues. The basis of genuine reform is economic reform. We can solve economic problems if we refuse to be distracted. The failure of courage among reformers to attempt to mobilize popular support for basic economic issues, which challenge the economic interests of big business, dooms their efforts to failure.

“The substitution of social issues in place of economic issues trifles with people’s problems, offers false solutions such as integration of schools, which are so bad that you wouldn’t want your kids to go to schools in any case. Trifling with social issues evades our responsibilities to face economic issues. It diminishes the potential of economic issues to rally popular support.”

Kucinich apparently feels that he has the issue of the 1980s befitting his dependence upon economics. That issue is protectionism and has the America-First thrust that strongly appeals to many in Ohio. It offers to the Rust Bowl and offers to Kucinich that gut-feeling issue that rallies people – particularly his major constituency through the years - working-class, unionized people.

But despite his concentration upon economic issues, it’s been the social issues that have tripped Kucinich, particularly race. One simply can’t divorce moral issues from the economic, because of the deep emotional nature of those issues.

Kucinich earned his political reputation early as an anti-black councilman with blistering attacks upon then Mayor Carl Stokes, now a Muny Court Judge. Early in his career, Kucinich spurned meetings and ignored pleas when the few blacks in his near west side ward were being intimidated by arson and shootings and had to be protected by the private patrols of ministers and others. Later he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in an all-white, working class district against former Congressman Ron Mottl. Kucinich tried to defeat Mottl, who proposed an anti-busing amendment to the U. S. Constitution by painting Mottl as too sympathetic to blacks. Kucinich supporters distributed a leaflet charging Mottl with voting to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday.

But Kucinich has been able to slide in different directions when the constituency or needs of a particular campaign demanded it. To win election as city clerk of courts, Kucinich began to mend his reputation among blacks. He started by campaigning for Stokes’ former bodyguard, James Barrett, when he ran for Sheriff.

As mayor, he had four blacks in his cabinet and provided patronage for the 21st District Caucus, a creation of Carl Stokes and now the political base of his brother, U. S. Congressman Louis Stokes.

Kucinich, however, has found it difficult to restrain the use of racial tracts in this often bitterly divided city. Cleveland’s politics have revolved around racial animosity for the last two decades at least, following community-straining boycotts of the schools in the mid-1960s over segregation, the death of a minister protesting against construction of more schools in the ghetto, and early racial uprisings that climaxed with the Hough riots in the mid and late 1960s.

Though Kucinich avoided overt racial politics in his race for mayor when most black leaders backed his opponent Edward Feighan, now a congressman, Kucinich did attack Forbes, politically the most prominent black leader, and linked him to Feighan. Kucinich won by 3,000 votes. During a bitter recall of Kucinich less than a year later, Kucinich again used Forbes as a symbolic target to attract white voters. Forbes’s strong support of Cleveland’s business community and his role in awarding tax abatements blunted the racial nature of Kucinich’s attacks.

During his third campaign (a vote to determine whether or not to sell Muny Light) in his term (2-years) as Mayor, Kucinich injected race with a letter to a public housing official objecting to construction of a low-cost development in a white neighborhood strongly supportive of Kucinich. He objected, he said, because the new residents, presumably black, would hurt the “social fabric” of the community.

After the two-to-one Muny Light victory, with strong support in black wards, Kucinich claimed, “What we have done is of great significance. We’ve united ethics and black people on economic issues. No one in Cleveland or in the country has been able to do that and that’s really the coalition of the future, because black people and white people can get together on economic issues.” That fit Kucinich’s professed urban populism by concentrating on economic, not social issues.

Not much later Kucinich violated his dictum on social issues by using busing politically to tar other candidates and solidify his support. Council voted $30,000 to distribute a film about the legal aspects of school desegregation. Kucinich vetoed the legislation. White council members, fearful the issue would be used against them in their wards, persuaded Forbes to avoid a vote to override the veto. That would allow them to avoid taking a public position before the election and end the matter, they thought.

However, Kucinich campaign leaders drew up leaflets and had volunteers begin a house-to-house campaign attacking individual council members for voting for “forced busing,” based on the original vote. The leaflets charged that a council member had “sold out on busing.” Further, it charged, he (council member) “voted three times for forced school busing when George Forbes desperately needed his vote.”

At the same time, across town, Kucinich campaigners were distributing a newspaper that referred to whites as “rednecks, racists and anti-civil righters.” An article began: “No issue has attracted more widespread attention in recent years than the Cleveland NAACP’s attempt to desegregate the schools. Conservatives, racist, rednecks and anti-civil-righters have collectively manipulated the media with ‘anti-busing’ rhetoric, suggesting on the one hand that they believe in equal opportunities but that they are against “massive forced cross-town bussing.’”

Almost amusingly, Kucinich’s forces used leaflets with George Forbes’s photograph in literature passed out on both the East and West sides of town but with the exact opposite messages. On the white West Side, Forbes was revealed as endorsing Republican George Voinovich. On the black East side, Forbes was made to appear to be endorsing Kucinich.

Forbes tried to derail Kucinich’s ride back to City Hall, going as far as to question Kucinich’s mental balance. Thus far, Kucinich and Forbes have coexisted as if they have an arrangement. (Forbes has said that Kucinich wasn’t a racist, as I also agree. Both of us, said Forbes, played race politics.)

Dennis, with his sights on statewide office and thus in need of black support in Ohio’s big cities could turn out to be George Forbes’s best friend locally.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldo@roadrunner.com
(:divend:)