Kucinich campaign losing touch with political reality [View All]

[Freddie Stubbs]

Hearts And Minds : Larry Durstin : Delusions of Grandeur

Columns / News & Opinion
Date: Feb 04, 2004 - 11:24 AM
Kucinich campaign losing touch with political reality

E-mail Larry Durstin at: [e-mail]

We all know how the game is played when it comes to presidential primaries. Candidates who are hopelessly behind always find a way to rationalize how victory will be snatched from the jaws of defeat and the critics, pundits and pollsters will be proved both wrong and downright foolish.

And that's all well and good and is certainly as American as both cherry pie and violence. A nod and a wink goes a long way in politics, and the crusading longshot truly does deserve both encouragement and admiration — up to a point, that is, and Dennis Kucinich is coming perilously close to careening through that point and into The Twilight Zone.

Watching Kucinich say with what appears to be a straight face that his strategy is to stay in the race until the Boston convention in July when the party, hopelessly split and unable to settle on a nominee, miraculously turns to him as its standard bearer, is as depressing as being subjected to the simultaneous re-emergence of both Donald Trump and Dennis Miller into prime-time television programming

First of all, in the event of a brokered convention — which will not happen, of course — only an MIT mathematician could calculate the number of ballots that would have to be taken before Kucinich's name would even be mentioned, let alone be voted on and actually nominated. It's one thing to say that should you not perform well in the primaries, you want your ideas to carry on and resonate with the party and even be part of the platform, but to concoct the kind of preposterous scenario Kucinich and his followers are putting forth is an insult to voters' intelligence.

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