Three critiques I hear regularly regarding Dennis Kucinich are: 1) He "switched" on choice to run for President, 2) You can't cut the Defense Budget during the "War on Terror," and 3) He's unelectable.
In the following essay, I take a crack at those three supposed weaknesses.
ChoiceDuring the period of time when Rep. Kucinich received the worst rating by groups that monitor pro-choice votes he:
1. Voted against requiring counselors to notify parents and impose a five-day waiting period when minors entered family planning clinics to buy contraceptives.
2. He voted to force federal health care plans that include drug coverage to include coverage for contraceptives.
3. He voted against creating a new crime of assaulting a pregnant women based on causing harm to a fetus.
4. He voted against a measure that would have banned the use of US Population funds to advocate abortion as a family planning measure.
5. He voted against banning "partial birth" abortion when the health of the mother is not specially protected as an exception to the ban.
Rep. Kucinich's votes are votes of empowerment. His votes, even during this time, were focused on putting more control over reproductive choice in the hands of the person making that choice. Since that time, he's come to a fuller understanding of the gender inequity ramifications involved in the pro-choice movement, and is the only candidate who has declared his intention to make judicial nominations subject to a litmus test on Roe v. Wade.
It should be noted that Antonin Scalia has expounded that judges should "quit" if they're not pro-death penalty, because that is the "law of the land." In just that way, Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, and no candidate has embarked on so bold a policy decision as to plumb from each potential judicial appointee their position on upholding that "law of the land." Rep. Kucinich's movement from personal empowerment to broad, full, and deep support of the positions of the pro-choice movement put him in the unique position of being the best candidate on choice, because he came to his position not through an examination of what would be the politically expedient choice, but through a natural evolution of his deeply held belief in personal empowerment and the responsibility of society and the government to play a healthy role in the development of that empowerment.
Candidate Kucinich is clearly, in my mind, the best candidate on choice.
Pentagon versus TerrorAs to the Pentagon, candidate Kucinich is the best candidate to promote safety and an effective defense as well.
A recent NOW with Bill Moyers presentation outlined the dramatic and startling inability of the Pentagon to track where it spends the mountains of money it receives from Congress. For more than 14 years it has been unable to answer the simple question, posed to it under the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, "did you spend the money Congress gave you on the things Congress authorized you to spend it on." Not once in 14 years has the Pentagon been able to answer "yes" or "no" to that simple question. That's not even a real audit. It's just accountability. The Pentagon is unaccountable to the public, because they can't figure out how they're spending the public's money. And if they can't determine how the money's being spent, they're not keeping us safe. Simple as that.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_spinney.htmlhttp://www.pbs.org/now/politics/defensedollars.htmlThe Pentagon is not keeping us safe. Where does the money go? Here's one place, and it ties directly with the corruption George Bush brought to Washington. CEO pay at Lockheed Martin went up from $5.8 million in 2000 to $25.3 million in 2002. CEO pay went up at General Dynamics from $5.7 million in 2001 to $15.2 million in 2002. It went up at Honeywell from $12.9 million in 2000 to $45 million in 2002. It went up from Northrop Grumman from $7.3 million in 2000 to $9.2 million in 2002. What do those figures say to you?
What they say to me is the Pentagon is another slush fund for rich military contractors to raid the Treasury.
The Pentagon is not keeping us safe when the cost of weapons rises faster than the price to produce them. That's called "cost growth" and what it means is the cost of weapons increases faster than the budget. And this has been going on for 40 years. And when the budget increases, that basically creates an incentive structure to jack up the cost even further. We saw this in the 1980's. You can think of the 1980's as the mother of all experiments. And when Ronald Reagan poured money into the defense budget the cost went through the roof.
Costs go up because the money goes in.
Data shows that when the Pentagon reduces the budget the contractors cut their costs. In some cases they come in under cost estimates when the money dries up. Producing the same product. It makes no economic sense in any kind of commercial context. It makes perfect political sense.
Only one candidate is calling for the Pentagon to be made 15% more efficient. Only one candidate is calling for the Pentagon to be made accountable to the people who pay for its systems with their tax dollars. Only one candidate is calling for the elimination of weapons systems no one wants, and the demilitarization of space.
That candidate is Dennis Kucinich.
Coupled with making the Pentagon more efficient, candidate Kucinich is proposing a Department of Peace to coordinate our peaceful contracting with other nations, and to oversee the initiation of educational efforts targeted at reducing fear and violence at home. This department would be the answer to the perpetual question of "who" when everyone calls for more "education" to reduce domestic violence, to promote safe havens in communities, to give children something to do other than get involved in gangs.
Only one candidate has a clear vision for keeping us safer here and abroad with a Pentagon strengthened through accountability, and a Department of Peace to oversee the building of strong and mutually beneficial relationships with nation-states, with our neighbors, and in our families.
That candidate is Dennis Kucinich.
ElectabilityLet's be clear here. Every Democratic candidate is electable. It's an overstatement, but not by much: A rock could probably beat Bush in 2004. Electability is not the issue. We are being tasked with choosing the best President we can get from the choices before us.
We should probably be grateful to George Bush for giving us this opportunity. Bush, the loser of the popular vote in 2000, got something like 50 million votes. Gore, the winner, got closer to 51 million. Eighty million eligible voters sat the election out.
The year 2000 was the neocon Waterloo. The Republican base of homophobes, gun nuts, uterus-enslavers, and corrupt corporatists is tapped. And since 2000 Bush has done his best to alienate every voter who crossed over to vote for him from the Libertarians and from the centrist Democrats.
All Bush has is fear.
All the Republicans have is a hope that their efforts to screw voters will mean they will be able to steal the vote in 2004 through: a) screwing the voters in Colorado through redistricting, b) screwing the voters in Texas through redistricting, c) screwing the voters in California through recall, d) screwing the voters in Florida by refusing to reinstate 50,000 voters wrongfully purged as felons, and e) screwing all the people of the nation by implementing Diebold's "black box" voting system with no paper trail (having eliminated the VNS watchdog and its exceptional record at predicting elections).
The Republicans wouldn't be working so hard to steal, screw, and deprive voters if they thought their message was going to carry them in 2004. They know they're screwed, and they're scared.
We own the issues, but we don't own the media (Podesta - get busy!) and we have to diligently guard against the destabilizing of the electoral process the Republicans have been engaging in with "black box" voting and redistricting and recall mayhem.
In my opinion, it's the overfunded extremist machine and its grip on the lapdog media that we must take care not to "misunderestimate." But I also think we have to be clear that right now it only runs on one thing - fear. There are three constituencies that are mobilized by the BFEE (that's Bush Family Evil Empire): Extremists, the fearful, and cookie-cutter patriots.
Bush got the highest number of votes he's ever going to get "on issues" in 2000. (Billion dollars a week on military adventurism while the energy grid fails at home - who thinks we need another tax cut?) Since he can't win on issues any longer, that's why we're seeing such a rush to fund-raise, a glut of electoral destabilizing moves from Republicans, and a blind and wholehearted embrace of "black box" voting technology forced on states by federal legislation.
Since Bush has literally driven Libertarians, Reduced Governmentists, Conservative Democrats, and most Independents away with his embrace of neo-conservative extremist positions on nearly everything since being appointed in 2000, and he has no respectable positions on anything that will be attractive to those constituencies or that he hasn't already debunked by his subsequent actions while in office, he'll win absolutely *zero* votes with his "compassionate conservative" hogwash this time around.
Bush has no issues, that's why he's running on extremism, fear, and cookie-cutter patriotism.
What that means, for every one of the candidates, is that all the positions belong to the Democrats. It should also mean that if the "fear" and "cookie-cutter patriotism" legs of the Bush campaign are neutralized, that Bush will be left with nothing to run on but extremism.
I'm not saying it will be a cakewalk (although given our advantage on issues it should be). But what should happen is this: All of the nearly 51 million voters who voted for Gore will reject Bush again this time (unless they're a) immobilized by fear, or b) turned into cookie-cutter patriots by the Evil Fairy Bushmother). Some of the 80 million who didn't vote should be motivated by restrictions on civil liberties or other heinous Bush policies to vote this time around. And Bush definitely won't get as many votes from the 50 million or so voters who voted for him last time, because he's alienated so many of those voters.
Issues will be the key, because Democrats own all the issues, except for, as I mentioned, fear, extremism, and cookie-cutter patriotism (but we *will* own or neutralize them by offering a candidate with a clear vision). Because Democrats own the issues, I believe we'll be in the best position to pick up all those votes (those of the 51 million Gore voters, the 80 million nonvoters, and the disenchanted from Bush's 50 million), by offering the candidate who is the best on the issues.
So, in my opinion, while the ability to competently elucidate coherent positions on the issues is and will be a means by which to distinguish the Democratic potential nominees from one another, to the extent that electability is an issue as it relates to Bush, the only thing that will matter is that the nominee is sufficiently *the opposite* of Bush's position on all the things that count.
Other than whether the candidate is "like Bush" or "not like Bush" on issues that resonate with voters (other than the three I mentioned: fear, extremism, and cookie-cutter patriotism) I still think the whole electability bugaboo is a red herring when used as a tool to distinguish one potential nominee from another.
We should nominate the candidate who is the best on the issues, and the election will take care of itself, the money will flow, and we'll evict the Poseur Prince from Al Gore's house.
The key for Bush will be to convince enough of the Gore voters, Independents, non-voters, and Democrats to a) vote for him because they're afraid, or b) give up their duty to think for themselves and buy into the cookie-cutter patriot hype machine.
I think it's a shame that this Fortunate Son and his sick cabal of neo-conservatives have been able to reduce the national dialog to these essentially ignorant and disrespectful issues (fear and fake patriotism), but as long as our candidate neutralizes one or both of these neo-conservative pathways to power, we win.
That's why whomever we nominate is going to be the next President of the United States.
So let's nominate the best then, shall we?
In my opinion, Dennis Kucinich is the candidate who is the best on the issues.
Dennis Kucinich for President of the United States of America.
Dan Brown
Saint Paul, Minnesota
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