I want to say upfront that I’m happy there’s a Dennis Kucinich. I’m happy he’s in the Democratic Party. I’m happy he’s in the House of Representatives. I’d be happy if he ever got into the Senate. But he’s not a viable presidential candidate, and I am hugely skeptical he’d make a good president. I am skeptical not because he is a liberal, or a lefty, but for reasons specific to Dennis Kucinich, the individual.
Kos has a post up knocking Dennis Kucinich’s presidential bid, and I mostly agree with his reasons. Predictably the Kucinichistas are unhappy, and overreacting.
First comment: “So, the lefties in the “big tent” really can go hang, eh?” Kucinich’s “leftiness” isn’t the real issue. About a thousand comments later: “Do Liberals still have a place in this party or not?” Kucinich’s liberalness isn’t the issue, either.
And Kos didn’t suggest kicking him out of the party. (1) He’s just saying he’s not ever going to be president, which he isn’t; and (2) if he were to be president he would probably be bad at the job.
On the whole I agree with Kucinich’s ideas — not all of ’em, but many of ’em. But people can have good ideas and be bad presidents. (I have a lot of good ideas — I happen to think all of my ideas are good — and I will tell you frankly I’d make a terrible president. They’d probably ship me off to an asylum less than a week after the inauguration. Even so, I’d do a better job than Bush.)
Part of my aversion to Dennis Kucinich is that I remember him as mayor of Cleveland. The Kucinichistas will tell you that his unpopularity as mayor came about because he refused to sell city utilities to a commercial interest and defaulted on municipal bonds instead. Actually, it might be argued that was the only thing he did right.
The truth is, the screwups began as soon as he was sworn in. Yes, Kucinich was young and inexperienced, but he seems to have lacked an appreciation for these weaknesses. He brought with him a “management” team of personal friends and political supporters who were just as inexperienced as he was. To me, Kucinich’s management “style” as mayor bears an uncanny resemblance to Bush’s — what he lacked in skills and experience he made up for in arrogance and hubris. The team fired a lot of ineffective bureaucrats, but they also fired effective bureaucrats and replaced them with hacks. To make a long story short, Kucinich and his staff took over a city struggling to deliver basic services and made it even worse. By the time Kucinich had left office he had pissed off everyone in Cleveland.
Kucinich’s ideas were not the problem. The problem was a combination of his temperament, bad judgment, and a tendency to be autocratic, showing a lack of respect for the processes of government and management
Now, that was a long time ago, and it’s entirely possible he has learned from his mistakes. But before considering him for the Chief Executive position, I’d like to see a demonstration. If Cleveland won’t take him back as mayor, then give him a toothpaste factory to run to see if he can make a go of it. If after six months the toothpaste is rolling out of the factory on schedule and the middle management staff hasn’t resigned, then I’ll cross my concerns about his executive abilities off the list. Otherwise, no.
Kucinich’s “Department of Peace” idea suggests to me he still hasn’t figured out what government is for, however. Certainly, I’m all for peace. But I have a problem with establishing a government bureaucracy for “creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development.” We all need to get it into our heads that the party in power shouldn’t be using the government to enforce its notions about morality and social development, whether I like those ideas or not. I don’t like it when the righties try to use government to manage the nation’s sexual behavior, for example.
This gets down some bedrock principles about why there is government at all. We need government to do things that we as individuals can’t do for ourselves (e.g., law enforcement; building interstate highways) or that the private sector probably wouldn’t do well because of conflicts of interest (e.g., meat inspection; security regulation). Righties want to privatize everything in sight. We lefties think this isn’t always a workable idea, and that in some circumstances government really does do a better job than the private sector. But just as there are some functions that shouldn’t go from public to private, there are also some functions that shouldn’t go from private to public. And creating social paradigm shifts is among the latter.
As near as I can tell, there isn’t any tangible thing Kucinich’s Department of Peace would do that some other branch of government — the State Department, the Justice Department, the Education Department — couldn’t do perfectly well if they were directed to do them. At one point in his proposal Kucinich actually says the Department of Peace would be a “counterbalance” to the Department of Defense. It’s as if he doesn’t grasp that, as President, he would be in a position to make changes within the Department of Defense. We need someone who will get inside the Pentagon and begin dismantling the military-industrial complex, not someone who thinks he can fight the military-industrial complex by setting up another bureaucracy outside the Pentagon.
What this tells me is that Dennis Kucinich doesn’t grasp how bureaucracy functions and what it is for. I’m not opposed to the Department of Peace idea because I’m opposed to paradigm shifts to peacefulness. I’m opposed to it because I think Kucinich lacks the grounded and practical understanding of executive process to make it happen. His general ideas are fine; the devil is in the details.
Kucinich has been steadfastly opposed to the Iraq War all along. He called for withdrawal of forces beginning in 2003, as soon as we went in. I admire him for that. However, his plan for withdrawal still involves replacing US troops with UN troops, which I think is a tad impractical. The UN has a proven track record of being utterly ineffectual when faced with actual violence. That Kucinich hasn’t noticed this suggests he’s not ready to direct the nation’s foreign policy. And, anyway, I rather doubt the UN would agree to it.
I very much like his ideas on national health insurance and battling the nasty effects of globalization. I hope he gets to put some of these ideas into real legislation, and the sooner the better.
But, as Kos says, it is a plain fact that not long ago Kucinich was anti-choice and anti-stem cell research, and he flipped his positions on these issues very suddenly just before he declared his candidacy for the 2004 nomination. Maybe he had a genuine change of heart, or maybe it was political expedience. But it concerns me, either way. It tells me he is a person liable to intrude into private matters that ain’t none of the Gubmint’s dadblamed business.
Well, flame away, Kucinichistas.
I read Kos’s post yesterday, and I admit I didn’t go back and look it up for re-reading today. I too was disturbed (and very surprised) to learn about Kucinich’s anti-abortion voting record. If Kos’s information is correct, for me there’s only one possible way to process it: Kucinich is not really a liberal. I use the term literally: from the root word liber, meaning “free.” Reproductive freedom, which is tied to both religious freedom and sovereignty over one’s own body, is absolutely central to “liberalism.”
And I have to add that it takes a mighty big soul to admit one’s own unfitness as presidential timber. I remember Martin Sheen, in private life a great social activist, once said something along the lines of the nation being better off that he wasn’t really the president (because, you know, he played such a brilliant one on TV).
Oh, the information is correct. He was nearly 100 percent against reproductive freedom until sometime in 2003, when he suddenly flipped and became 100 percent for it.This tells me he’s something less than the pure-as-the-driven-show leftie that his followers claim he is.
But people can have good ideas and be bad presidents.
Yes, exactly. I felt the same way about Jesse Jackson when he ran. The fact that some candidate agrees with me about a lot of stuff does not make him or her right for the job.
I don’t trust Kuchinich’s steadiness either.
But, is there anything comparable on the right to our knee-jerk cringing at anyone on the left who is slightly kooky?
We bemoan all the time how the media use extreme righty pundits but consider center-left views to be extreme left. For balance, they should have a communist for every Christianist, an anarchist for every vigilante, a genuine pacifist for every “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” righty war-monger. But they don’t. I think they consider Rep. Conyers too left to be a representative of the extreme left.
And I think we bear some of the blame for that state of affairs. They defend their right; we help them discredit our left.
Maha,
You are right about administration. Gutting the beaurocracy of competent people because they are ideologically impure is the sign of a fanatic. (Sound familiar?) Part of government is getting the services you pay for. The hated beaurocrats do keep things running. People on both right and left scream when the potholes aren’t fixed and the power grid goes down. You need to be a competent administrator, too.
Griff
First of all, NO candidate is PRO abortion. They “support a woman’s right to choose.” Bill Clinton is the typical example of this position. This seems to cross party lines, now.
Second, I won’t vote for any democrat that doesn’t look as good as Mitt Romney. Okay, I’m being facetious, but isn’t that what this is about. You gotta LOOK presidential. Not that GWBush ever looked presidential. Kucinich just can’t look presidential. All the wafflers are saying, “Gee, I like what he is saying, I just don’t think he can be elected.”
But the Kos commenter’s remark still applies – where in the big tent do lefties look for representation? Where have the mainstream, middle-of-the-road Democrats brought the country and the party in the last half-century?
Kucinich apparently did lots of things wrong as mayor. But that was 30 years ago, when he was 31 years old. And in the 90s, Cleveland honored him for saving the city a couple of hundred million dollars by his actions as mayor. So the book on his time as mayor is not all bad.
I have no idea who I’ll vote for in the 2008 primary. But if Kucinich is the candidate who most represents my beliefs, and right now that seems to be the case, he’ll get my vote.
To me, it’s not important that anyone take him seriously as a candidate. What is important, I think, is that people begin to take his ideas seriously enough to discuss and criticize them, as you’ve done here. As stated in one of the comments at DailyKos, a serious discussion of Kucinich’s ideas helps shift the “Overton Window” of acceptable political thought away from the far right and back to the center of the political spectrum. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
But the Kos commenter’s remark still applies – where in the big tent do lefties look for representation? Where have the mainstream, middle-of-the-road Democrats brought the country and the party in the last half-century?
We have to grow them ourselves. We cannot sit around waiting for people to show up in Washington who represent our ideals. We must find people at the local and state level and support them and get them elected in primaries and send them to Washington.
Kucinich apparently did lots of things wrong as mayor. But that was 30 years ago, when he was 31 years old. And in the 90s, Cleveland honored him for saving the city a couple of hundred million dollars by his actions as mayor. So the book on his time as mayor is not all bad.
I’m pretty sure the honors were for the utilities controversy, which as I said was the one thing he got right.
Yes, the mayor gig was years ago, but (1) I’m not aware he’s had another administrative position since, and (2) from his ideas about bureaucracy, it doesn’t seem he had learned from his mistakes. And he was REALLY bad. I mean colossally, stupendously bad. He didn’t just makes some mistakes; he was thoroughly bad at pretty much every aspect of the mayor job. If he had any aptitude for administration he wouldn’t have been as bad as he was.
I have no idea who I’ll vote for in the 2008 primary. But if Kucinich is the candidate who most represents my beliefs, and right now that seems to be the case, he’ll get my vote.
That’s fine, but do remember that being president is an administrative/executive position, and presidents don’t write laws. We’re essentially hiring someone to do a job, and in my experience his competence in doing that job ends up mattering a lot more than what he promises while he’s campaigning. I think the “ideas” stuff really just gives you a general idea of where his head is; it doesn’t tell you what you’re going to get if you buy the package.
First of all, NO candidate is PRO abortion. They “support a woman’s right to choose.” Bill Clinton is the typical example of this position. This seems to cross party lines, now.
First of all, NOBODY said PRO abortion. Not me, not any of the other commenters. Clearly you cannot read. I hate people who can’t read.
Second, I won’t vote for any democrat that doesn’t look as good as Mitt Romney. Okay, I’m being facetious, but isn’t that what this is about.
No, but since you can’t read, clearly you would have no idea what the post was about. I feel bad about that. I hope your literacy skills are sufficient for this:
LEARN TO READ..
Got that? I can’t stress that enough. It’s very important when criticizing written communication that you actually read it first, and while reading, comprehend what is written.
You gotta LOOK presidential. Not that GWBush ever looked presidential. Kucinich just can’t look presidential. All the wafflers are saying, “Gee, I like what he is saying, I just don’t think he can be elected.”
I’m not waffling at all. I’m saying the man lacks the skills and temperament for the job. I said that very clearly. It’s a damn shame you can’t read; you might have learned something.
Well, it’s off to the twit filter for you! (See Rules for Commenting, especially #8.]
I always enjoy reading you. To me Kucinich says things I sometimes want to hear and sit pleasantly on my ears as Al Sharpton did four years ago but I would never want him (or Al) to be president. I try to vote for someone with a bit of gravitas which he totally lacks.
His Department of Peace idea is that of a person without ideas. As you note there is enough to fix in the existing departments without adding another one. We have a Department of Defense that should be renamed Department of War, its old name. It really is not defending us as much as it is warring on others. Or we could rightly call that the Department of Peace because its goal according to many is to bring peace to various parts of the world.
As far as the abortion issue is concerned, anyone over 40 who has changed from one pro to another pro in the last ten years (Kucinich – life to choice; Romney – choice to life; ) is not a serious person. We have suffered through at least 10 years of being led by persons who are not serious. (Yes, Clinton, highly capable but decided the presidency was more about him than about governing.) I am desperately seeking a competent serious person, a Teddy Roosevelt type. A smart non-naïve person, physically courageous, who desires to right this tilting ship for non-selfish motives. Maybe Obama fits the bill but is he anything more than a smooth talker? What gives him the qualifications to be president? I’ve got lots of thinking to do and I’ll read you to help figure this out but right now except for Obama I see nothing appealing.
It’s really such a shame that we can’t take each of the things we like from each of the candidates and build the perfect candidate, then run that person.
Honestly, who in the media really thinks Kucinich is a truly viable candidate? If the media did think so, the media would immediately tear him to pieces over his religion, his veganism and his dept of peace.
For the time being, I support him because of his position on NAFTA and globalization.
I am desperately seeking a competent serious person, a Teddy Roosevelt type. A smart non-naïve person, physically courageous, who desires to right this tilting ship for non-selfish motives.
Today over at dKos, there’s a diary about how, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, one American (ex-)politician chartered a plane on his own dime and personally brought over 250 hospital patients to hospitals in Tennessee. That would be Al Gore.
As someone who’s impressed with Kucinich, both Kos’ original argument and your own provide a nice counterpoint to my own amiable feelings toward the guy.
While Kos blatantly disdained Kucinich’s New Age leanings, this is one of Dennis’ strongest appeals to a significant portion of the spiritual left, including myself. There are huge numbers of people in this country who count themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious” who are Dennis’ natural constituency. Kos, who completely disdained this, is very much behind the curve on this aspect of Kucinich or left wing politics in general. I wish he and other secular lefties would realize the immense potential here, by a bit more open minded and seeing these people as important allies, in much the same way that Republican strategists years ago realized that they had a huge potential consituency numbering in the millions, sitting in fundamentalist churches. This is an obvious pick-up for our side, if only secularlists like Kos could get past their biases.
It’s very typical of spiritual people, especially of the New Age variety to be less than grounded. Their ideas, their focus is all “up there”, but for many, this idealism doesn’t have legs – hence the proposal for a Department of Peace instead of understanding the existing departments and knowing what to change in them. And when you put people like this in a position of power, which is their big chance to implement their utopia, they can run roughshod over the rest of us. Idealists are like that.
I’ve often thought that Dennis is at least 50 years ahead of everyone (but then, I feel that way about myself much of the time). I honestly don’t know where he belongs, but I am reluctantly agreeing with you and Kos that he would be dicey at best as President. Our electoral system is creaky junk at this point, but at least it’s extremely unlikely to produce a President Dennis Kucinich any time soon. That said, it is oh so good to have him and his ideas in the mix. He was dead on about Iraq, before almost anyone else.
In some ways Kucinich reminds me of Jerry Brown, another political visionary I admire. I don’t really know how grounded Brown is, although I suspect he’s more capable than Dennis in this regard. Brown went from Governor of California, to presidential candidate, to being mayor of Oakland. I haven’t heard anything bad about his tenure there. Like you, I’d like to see if Dennis has matured enough by letting him run something small – another go at an executive position, such as mayor of Cleveland (again) would be great – before I could wholeheartedly trust him.
I would like to vote for Kucinich in the Texas primary, even though I happen to share your misgivings about him. Why? Because with this particular mix of candidates for the dem nomination, a vote for Kucinich in one’s state primary is a vote intended to tell the DLC/neoliberal wing of the party, “No, you don’t get to walk all over the rank and file and disregard our concerns.”
But a vote for a quixotic paleoliberal in a state primary is crucially different as a protest vote from a vote for, say the Green Party candidate in November, at least in a state where there’s a real contest for the delegates, like Ohio or Florida.
I know Kucinich isn’t going to get the nomination, and ironically this makes me feel less reluctance to vote for him than I might otherwise have. If he seemed like more of a viable candidate for the party’s nomination his deficits would loom larger in my calculus.
My only qualm about voting for him is that it would also be a vote against a potentially viable Obama nomination. Although I also note that the DLC wing isn’t automatically going to interpret an Obama vote as a rejection of their policies and rhetoric the same way that a Kucinich vote registers. (Now, I have reservations about Obama’s ability to win the general election, but that’s an entirely different issue.)
Kucinich is unique, isn’t he? Somehow he can speak of spirit and stardust and metaphysical matters all the while working his butt off in Congress to champion legislation that represents our progressive values.
The real value of seriously thinking about a ‘Department of Peace’ is that it would involve a thorough house-cleaning review of the whole of our governmental institutions …. highlighting exactly how or even whether those systems are functioning in terms of world peace. For example, such would review how our State Department may be strong-arm-promoting U.S. corporate interests abroad in a way that harms good will/peace. As Maha says, the devil is in the details.
If ever there is a metaphysical concept that I believe in, it is that ‘energy follows thought’. Though I do not know the details of the Peace Department as conceived by the Kucinich folks,
I applaud the idea of putting energy behind conceptualizing peaceful behavior, as compared to the flood we swim in today of thinking about, ahem, ‘winning peace’ through conflict and/or coercion.
The very process of thinking about a design for a Peace Department is bold and valuable. Sorta like going through a mid-life crisis that forces one to take stock of whether what has been set into same-old patterns [career, relationships, activities, etc] is what really reflects one’s preferences and goals.
I met Kucinich in early 2004 and heard him speak near Chicago. Then I watched every single one of the Democratic primary debates. I greatly respect this man and am grateful that he is in our world and our party. Saying that, I have to add that I began to cringe hearing the repetition of his stump speech in that sorta shrill rapid cheerleader type cadence he used to deliver his positions. I cannot imagine Kucinich as POTUS, speaking for all of America……so there it is, energy follows thought, and I imagine a more able communicator as our spokeperson in the world……Obama, Richardson, Edwards, Clark, Gore, Clinton, Dodd, Biden… all possess more of ‘it’ as communicators. Let one of them become the main communicator, and honor Kucinich for his vision and honorable gad-fly role.
…do remember that being president is an administrative/executive position, and presidents don’t write laws.
That’s a narrow view of a president’s role. FDR changed this country for the better with his vision and leadership. JFK inspired confidence in government instead of mistrust, and his audacity put a man on the moon. LBJ extended FDR’s vision with Medicare and Medicaid. Reagan’s own brand of leadership and vision led us (and is still leading us) far in the opposide direction.
I don’t know if Kucinich is capable of that kind of leadership. But he has a vision that, for the most part, I and a good number of Dems share.
FDR changed this country for the better with his vision and leadership.
FDR wasn’t the first president who was able to get a broad legislative agenda enacted, but yes, he did do that. However, if you’ve been hanging out in the world as long as I have you notice after a while that when an administration is over and the dust has settled, what they had promised to do during the election campaign and what they actually accomplished are usually two different things.
Once in a while you get vision and leadership in the same package. Sometimes you get vision without leadership, and sometimes you get leadership without vision. I think Bill Clinton had amazing leadership abilities, but it’s hard to say what his vision was. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was definitely a visionary, but for one reason or another he wasn’t able to lead the country or the Congress toward what he envisioned.
Dennis Kucinich strikes me as something like Jimmy Carter with worse management skills. And I truly love Jimmy Carter and am always upset when the righties run him down. The truth is that Carter was right about many things, and the nation would have done well to have listened to him. But for one reason or another he just couldn’t pull it together and get the nation behind him. And the Carter Administration helped pave the way for the Reagan ascendancy.
I have no problem at all with Dennis Kucinich’s vision. But the devil is in the details. The Department of Peace idea, IMO, exemplifies both what is right and what is wrong about Kucinich. From what I have read about it, I probably agree with every single goal that Kucinich lays out for the Department of Peace. Establishing a whole new (and redundant) bureaucracy to carry out this agenda, however, is blindingly stupid on several levels and screams “bad manager” at me, very loudly. My fear is that he’d do to the U.S. what he did to Cleveland 30 years ago. He had vision then, too. It’s just that he had no clue what to do with the vision.
There’s a difference between “vision” and “policy.” The current Dem party tends to be heavy on wonkishness; we’ve got a lot of politicos who are grand at churning out policy, but it’s policy that goes nowhere. So I understand the longing for vision. But Kucinich doesn’t seem to be a detail guy. He knows where he wants to go, but he has no clue how to get there.
The idea about using UN troops in Iraq is an example. Getting out of Iraq is a grand, if not exactly original, idea. Replacing US troops with UN troops is not. It’s as if he has no comprehension of what is really going on in Iraq and how UN peacekeeping functions actually work in the real world. (And in all of the statements Kucinich has made about this idea, he seems never to address the possibility that the UN would refuse to go along with the plan, as I suspect they would.)
So, I say again, I have no problem with Kucinich’s vision. I’m saying vision alone isn’t enough.
Re your comments:
“Kucinich’s “Department of Peace†idea suggests to me he still hasn’t figured out what government is for, however. Certainly, I’m all for peace. But I have a problem with establishing a government bureaucracy for “creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development.†We all need to get it into our heads that the party in power shouldn’t be using the government to enforce its notions about morality and social development, whether I like those ideas or not. I don’t like it when the righties try to use government to manage the nation’s sexual behavior, for example.”
Kucinich’s idea for a Department of Peace is a wonderful and imaginative proposal, notwithstanding your disparagement. For one thing, it is designed to change the mindset of Americans that the first response to any world crisis is send in the Marines. By merely having a Department of Peace (DOP), citizens can better understand that the better way is not to kick ass but to negotiate and compromise. Secondly, a DOP says to everyone that cluster bombs, war planes and tanks are tools of the immature state and should be seen as such and politically counter-productive by everyone, ordinary citizen as well as important congress-person. Making war should not be the proper function of government, keeping the peace should be. A DOP is surely civic development, and not “social development” as you imply.
Roberto in Utah
Roberto — you’re not getting it. I applaud what Kucinich wants to accomplish with his Department of Peace. The disconnect is that all of the tangible goals could be accomplished quite nicely with existing bureaucracy, and the intangible ones — e.g., “changing the mindset of Americans,” which is social change, pure and simple — is simply not something that government bureaucracies do well. If at all.
Instead of setting up another bureaucracy, a real leader would turn his whole administration into a Department of Peace. Every cabinet-level department would be directed toward accomplishing the goals of peace. That’s leadership. That’s what someone who knows how to get things done would do. Kucinich’s approach is what someone who has no clue how government and bureaucracies work would do.
Good point. Where else can we find examples of purported laudable ideals that lacked execution and became little more than lip service?
Hmm….it’s not under the sofa…under the desk.