Cleveland to Dennis Kucinich: Phone home

Back in Ohio, the left's favorite long shot is paying the price for his presidential ambitions. Calling him out of touch, four Democrats will try to take his House seat Tuesday.

By Edward McClelland

Read more: Democratic Party, Dennis Kucinich, Politics, Aliens, News, UFOs, Ohio, 2008 election

March 3, 2008 | CLEVELAND -- Dennis Kucinich wanted to take part in a debate on the campus of Cleveland State University last week. But not this one. Kucinich wanted to be at the Wolitzer Center on Tuesday, with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, putting forth his antiwar message on national TV. Instead, he was in a school concert hall on Friday, defending his congressional seat against a city councilman, a nonprofit executive, a suburban mayor and a Gold Star mother. He faces all four in a Democratic primary March 4.

Most Clevelanders were proud of their irrepressible congressman when he ran for president in 2004. He spoke out against the Iraq war when it wasn't politically safe to do so, and if he reveled too much in the spotlight -- appearing in a "Dating Game" skit with Jay Leno, for example -- well, the rest of America was just getting a look at their Dennis, an eccentric but iconic Cleveland character.

The second time around, though, Kucinich's White House bid looked like pure ego trip, especially to voters who had thought they'd heard him promise not to run for president again. Cleveland is leading the nation in home foreclosures, they grumbled, while Dennis is out West with crunchy celebrities. Then Kucinich claimed to have seen a UFO. Cleveland is touchy about its image, and Dennis, they said, was making the city look like a joke again.

Kucinich was a few minutes late for the debate, creeping down the auditorium stairs and smoothing his forelock as a local talk-radio host introduced the candidates. Once he took his seat, though, he looked like the soberest man in the room. Kucinich's hair is still dark, his suit was baggy, but it's hard now to see the Boy Mayor in his gnarled, deep-set, 61-year-old features. Every once in a while, his face twinkled when he caught sight of his wife, Elizabeth, sitting in the third row, but most of the time, he looked like a worn Balkan judge, doggedly taking notes with a felt-tip pen.

Before Kucinich even had a chance to speak, his main rival, City Councilman Joe Cimperman, unloaded on him. Cimperman is the first serious challenger Kucinich has faced in his 12-year congressional career; his half-million dollar war chest forced Kucinich out of the presidential race, and back home to Cleveland.

"I feel very passionately about the fact that our congressman has been absent," Cimperman said. "We wouldn't have this group up here today if someone hadn't run for president twice, and that person is Mr. Kucinich."

Kucinich was unapologetic. National issues are Cleveland issues, he countered.

"I led the effort in the United States Congress in challenging this administration's march into this illegal war," he said. "Is this war not an issue for Cleveland? This war has cost every household already $16,000. We've lost brave young men and women from Cleveland. I made that war an issue in the presidential campaign. Is healthcare not a Cleveland issue, with one-third of Clevelanders uninsured and underinsured? I'm proud to represent Cleveland, and I've represented it with honesty and integrity, in a career that goes back a long way, starting on this campus."

He spoke slowly and gravely, not like the excitable rat dog of his local legend, but like the near-elderly antiwar sage he has become. One of the few times Kucinich raised his voice was when an opponent pointed out that he has passed only two pieces of legislation in 12 years -- one to allow a local museum to show a government film.

"In a Republican Congress!" Kucinich snapped.

After the debate, Kucinich told Salon that his presidential runs had nothing to do with putting four opponents on that stage. He never promised not to run for president -- "I said that I had no intention of running, and what happened was the Democrats decided they were going to continue to fund the war, and I felt it was important to challenge that."

Kucinich, a lifelong master at firing up his supporters with us-vs.-them campaigns, said his opponents are funded by Cleveland developers who have hated him since he was mayor in the late 1970s.

"These interest groups have a lock on the politics of this city, but they've never had a lock on me," he said. "I beat them years ago, and they see this as an opportunity to just grab this congressional seat for the purposes of their own moneyed interests."

Dennis Kucinich has been Cleveland's most polarizing politician for nearly 40 years, since he was elected to a city council seat at age 23. In a single two-year term as mayor, he fired his police chief on live TV, drove the city into default by refusing to sell the public electric utility, Municipal Light, and survived a recall by 231 votes. After losing reelection, and a race for governor, he spent several years in New Mexico on "a quest for meaning," reemerging in 1994 to win a seat in the Ohio state Senate. Defiantly, he ran on his City Hall record. Keeping the utility in public hands saved Clevelanders millions of dollars, so his campaign button was a light bulb with the slogan "Because He Was Right."

Even Kucinich's detractors admire his idealism, but they say he's more interested in grandstanding and self-righteous crusades than passing bills that would ease the economic woes of Cleveland, which has twice been named "poorest city in America." Kucinich voted against expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, because it didn't cover children of immigrants. (He later voted to override President Bush's veto of the same bill.)

"He gives up the good in order to get the perfect," primary opponent Rosemary Palmer, who got involved in politics after her son was killed in Iraq in 2005, told Salon. "That's wonderful to have someone to rally the troops if you have someone else to bring home the bacon."

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