According to the suit: “Said sandwich wrap was unwholesome and unfit for human consumption, in that it was represented to contain pitted olives, yet unknown to plaintiff contained an unpitted olive or olives which plaintiff did not reasonably expect to be present in the food prepared for him, and could not visually detect prior to consumption.”

Kucinich claims he suffered “serious and permanent dental and oral injuries” and has sustained “other damages as well,” including “suffering and loss of enjoyment.”

Kucinich seeks $150,000 in damages. Gawker found video of Kucinich talking on the floor of the house five days after Olivegate, and he seems fine, but just as it’s inappropriate to suggest that Jay Cutler was faking his injuries because he could briefly ride a bike on the sidelines, we shouldn’t assume that Dennis wasn’t suffering from an acute loss of enjoyment as he addressed the House.

I’ve been on the DCCC’s fundraising e-mail list since September of last year (I’m signed up for the lists for all of the party campaign committees on both sides), and this is the first time during that period that they’ve used Kucinich’s name in an appeal like this. Indeed, it’s rare that a message will go out under the name of a House Democrat other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi or DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen. The rare exceptions are fairly big names like Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.

Under current circumstances, though, using Kucinich makes perfect sense. He can appeal to liberals who might not open their wallets for a lot of other members of Congress, and his seal of approval can be used in an effort to convince Democrats who think the reform legislation doesn’t go far enough that they should stay active with the party this year anyway.

In his remarks this morning, Kucinich sounded concerned, and pained, about the crazed and vicious opposition that the Obama presidency has inspired on the right. “One of the things that has bothered me is the attempt to try to delegitimize his presidency. That hurts the nation when that happens,” the Cleveland congressman said, sounding genuinely anguished. “We have to be very careful” that “President Obama’s presidency not be destroyed by this debate … Even though I have many differences with him on policy, there’s something much bigger at stake here for America.”

Kucinich knows as well as anyone that the president is far from a socialist; he’s a centrist corporatist Democrat, and that was clear back when Kucinich stood well to his left during the 2008 primaries. And even though the Cleveland progressive normally avoids partisan calculations about power and opportunity, and votes his conscience and ideology, Kucinich decided to support Obama’s healthcare reform plan because right now, partisan calculations about power and opportunity actually serve his left-wing conscience and ideology.

Kucinich understands that there will be no healthcare reform for another generation if this bill doesn’t pass. There will be no second Obama term either (and don’t dream about lefty primary challenges — there won’t be a Democrat in the White House in 2013 if his name isn’t Obama). The only thing worse than being an alleged socialist in American politics is being a weak, ineffectual socialist, and if the president and his party can’t get this package passed, despite controlling the White House and a healthy majority in both houses of Congress, they will be rebuked by the voters. And maybe rightly rebuked. What better sign that a party isn’t ready to govern?

I’ve written extensively about my disappointment with Obama and the Democrats, particularly around the healthcare reform plan. He gave Republicans and conservative Democrats too much power for too long, and he sold out early to the insurance and pharmaceutical industry. I don’t like the deals Obama made, but he did what he thought he had to do. The left thinks he’s wrong; we can prove that when we have a better hold on power. But we won’t move the party left by abandoning Obama on healthcare (on detention and secrecy issues, I mostly have abandoned him). Like it or not, Obama is roughly at the party’s center; we should work to pull him left. If progressives set him up as a right-winger to try to demonize and defeat him, they will become irrelevant.

This bill isn’t perfect, but it will help millions of people. That’s why Republicans are fighting it so hard — and why they decided to fight it before Obama made a proposal (as this profile of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell shows). Right now, I believe, conscience and ideology are served by looking at the political calculations: This bill is the best we can do right now. Obama was the best we could do in a president. A defeat hurts not just Obama, but the progressive movement in this country.

I found myself surprisingly moved by the decision of 60 Catholic nuns, representing 59,000 sisters, to buck the power-mad bishops and come out for the bill today, even as opportunists like Bart Stupak continue to insist it somehow funds abortion. (They made up for the exorcist/moron who blamed the priest/pedophilia problem on working mothers.) The nuns speak for me, too:

The health care bill that has been passed by the Senate and that will be voted on by the House will expand coverage to over 30 million uninsured Americans. While it is an imperfect measure, it is a crucial next step in realizing health care for all. It will invest in preventative care. It will bar insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. It will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children. And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments – $250 million – in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.

In 2010, this is as good as it gets when it comes to healthcare reform. Progressives have to work harder to build support — real, voting support, not just opinion-polling support — for our views. (I know people nominally support the public option in opinion polls, but it doesn’t yet drive their votes like other issues do.) We can make the healthcare system better after the bill passes, and we can make Congress better. But it will be very hard to do either if Obama and the Democrats lose this one.

(An earlier version of this post included Michael Moore among the progressives who oppose the health care reform bill. Moore reversed his earlier opposition in a letter to fans Wednesday morning, which I missed.)

“It’s been clear that the vote on the final healthcare bill will be very close,” Kucinich, D-Ohio, told reporters. “I know I have to make a decision not on the bill as I would like to see it, but as it is … I’ve decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation.”

Kucinich had been the lone progressive holding out against the bill from the left. He opposed it because it didn’t have a public option, because it promised billions of dollars for private insurance companies, because it lacked significant measures to move the country toward better overall health and nutrition. That won him scorn from the likes of the Daily Kos, and a threat of a primary challenge in the 2012 elections. But it also got him plenty of attention from the White House. He met with President Obama four times, including on an Air Force One flight to Cleveland this week, to discuss the bill. He told reporters that when he left the White House after the meeting before this one, he had no thought that he might ever flip from a “no” to a “yes” vote. “My criticism of the legislation has been well-reported,” he said. “I do not retract those criticisms, I incorporate them into this statement.”

But in the end, Kucinich said he simply couldn’t be the one to crush Obama’s agenda. And he also couldn’t be the one to keep the 50-year debate over healthcare in America stuck where it’s been. “This is a defining moment for whether or not we’re going to have any opportunity to move past square one on healthcare,” he said.

That’s likely to be how other Democrats wind up coming down by the time the votes are held this weekend. Kucinich won’t bring anyone else along with him, though; the only other Democrat who voted against the bill in the House last fall because it didn’t go far enough was Eric Massa, and, well, he’s not voting this time around.

Still, while some progressives may cast Kucinich’s move as a sellout, it was hard not to give him some credit for looking at the reality of the mess Congress finds itself in. The conservative Democrats that make the difference between the party being in the majority and the minority, in both chambers, weren’t going to go along with much more than the bill as it’s been written. Kucinich said he pushed as hard and as far as he could for his priorities, but realized, eventually, that he wasn’t going to win. And he also realized that he couldn’t let Obama’s opponents win.

“People are looking for something,” he said. “They’re looking for some hope that maybe something can be changed … One of the things that has bothered me is the attempt to try to delegitimize his presidency. That hurts the nation when that happens. He was elected.”

And that, basically, was that. Kucinich stood patiently, eagerly answering questions for 25 minutes, until his staff told him he had to leave the press conference; it was more attention than he’d gotten from the mainstream media during his presidential campaign. Even as reporters dredged up quotes from Kucinich bashing the bill, or asked him what kind of special deal he’d gotten the White House to agree to, he never blinked.

“There was no Nebraska- or Louisiana-type deal,” he said. “This wasn’t about the kind of deal-making that is essentially self-defeating towards the goal and that undermines public confidence in the bill.” If only Ben Nelson had thought that way last December, the bill might have been passed by now.