Later this week, we’ll find out whether Dennis Kucinich, the former progressive presidential candidate and professional gadfly recently districted out of his long-term Congressional seat in Ohio, intends to follow through on his threats to run for a seat in Washington state instead.
Ohio’s redistricting threw Kucinich into a primary race last March against Marcy Kaptur, in a new district that largely overlaps the district Kaptur has held nearly 30 years. Not surprisingly, Kaptur won.
Kucinich, however — anticipating this possibility and with an unerring nose for What’s Best for Dennis — had spent much of the previous year shopping around the country for a fallback plan and, by last fall, had clearly settled on Washington state. He’s made numerous trips to Western Washington since then, seeking support for a possible run.
The filing deadline for the August primary isn’t until mid-June, but to be eligible to run, Kucinich would need to establish residency in his preferred district and register to vote by Friday.
The power of Dennis
The fact that Democratic Party leadership was fine with sacrificing Kucinich tells you a lot — but not all — about his career in Congress and his assorted presidential campaigns.
I’m of two minds about Kucinich. I’ve agreed with many of his viewpoints, and he has frequently been proven right — on Iraq, on Wall Street and corporate power, on civil liberties, on free trade, on the War on Drugs — when establishment politicians of both parties were wrong. On the other hand, he has always struck me as “right message, wrong messenger.”
Kucinich’s certitude about everything he says (a character trait progressives hated in George W. Bush) meant he either didn’t realize or didn’t care that talking about seeing UFOs; or his vegan diet; or his much younger, trophy wife; or his signature pipe dream, the Department of Peace (a lovely concept that will be taken seriously in Congress the day Hell melts), discredited his more relatable points in the eyes of many people.
We’ve seen eccentric but effective politicians before, and many highly respected and decorated politicians have vomited up their share of lunatic ideas over the years. But eccentric plus ideas outside the mainstream is not a good combination.
Kucinich — with no legislation to speak of to his credit and laughably poor results in his presidential runs — has accomplished little more in his congressional career than ratifying the views of people who already agree with him.
That’s not enough. In modern politics — where personal image, “likeability” and “values” count for far more in the public’s mind than ideas — trumpeting personal beliefs and practices far outside the mainstream is a kiss of death for being taken seriously, even if the other, political points you’re making make sense.
If those points are also outside the mainstream, it doesn’t merely publicize outlier views — it also discredits them.
Folks I’ve encountered over the years in what I’ll call the “Church of Dennis” (people who fawn over Kucinich because he speaks their truth to power) are a subset of a larger and frustratingly common belief among too many progressives that, in politics, it’s enough to be right, that facts alone will win the day. As Republicans learned long ago, that just ain’t so.
You need to build coalitions, find your sources of power and wield them effectively. Having facts on your side can help, but if they don’t help the position you’ve already staked out, you can just invent your own facts (c.f. the entire current Republican Party).
It’s an appalling aspect of American politics — and of an establishment media whose tolerance of, if not enthusiasm for — lies and emotional demagoguery that enables such behavior. But being appalling makes it no less real, and that’s why, for all his long national profile, Kucinich’s absence from Congress won’t mean much at all.
He told truth to power, sure, but power didn’t care, and not enough other people were convinced of his views that power needed to care. And Kucinich, forever the gadfly, never developed power of his own.
Does anybody want him?
That’s only one reason why a Kucinich candidacy in Washington state would be a long shot.
It’s not entirely clear which district he’d run in, but the obvious choices — the new 10th District in Olympia, the open seats in the 1st and 6th vacated by Jay Inslee and Norm Dicks, respectively, and the 8th District seat held by Dave Reichert — range from swing districts to (in Reichert’s case) solidly Republican. None are a good fit for Kucinich’s progressivism.
The state Democratic Party has been uniformly against him (Democratic Party chair Dwight Pelz: “Will [Kucinich] be remembered as a principled member of Congress or the narcissist who lost two Congressional races in two states the same year?”).
The Republicans — with the chance to win the governor’s office for the first
[[In-content Ad]]