http://www.publicintegrity.org/bop2004/candidate.aspx?cid=10Kucinich faced a difficult job as Cleveland's mayor. The city was running major deficits, almost $20 million dollars at that time, and Kucinich had inherited tens of millions of dollars in debt from his Republican predecessor, Ralph Perk. Kucinich's confrontational political style did not help either. He antagonized many of Cleveland's business elite and quickly found himself at odds with the Democratic-dominated city council. The hostility between established city-council representatives and Kucinich's 20-something mayoral staff, mockingly called the "Kiddie Corps," was deep and would occasionally devolve into personal insults and accusations.
By the spring of 1978 a coalition of critics and staunch political opponents had aligned themselves against Kucinich. The enmity betweens the two groups made governing Cleveland nearly impossible and the city's budgetary outlook became all the more bleak. When Kucinich unceremoniously fired police chief Richard Hongisto on live television that March, his rivals used the wave of public outrage to lodge a recall campaign to remove Kucinich from office. Although the recall election failed, it marked the beginning of Kucinich's precipitous fall from municipal grace. During the remainder of his term, Kucinich presided over a city that became known as the "Crisis Capital of the U.S." Cleveland became the first major American city to default since the Great Depression. Its bond rating was lowered twice by Moody's Investor Service, and the police force went on strike in response to proposed budget cuts. Not surprisingly, Kucinich lost the 1979 mayoral election.
When Kucinich left office in defeat, many observers reasonably assumed that his career in politics was over. And when in 1982 he lost the Democratic primary for Ohio Secretary of State, their evaluation indeed seemed justified.
But after four years of political exile, Kucinich returned to the political arena when Cleveland Councilman Joseph Kowalski died with two years left in his term. Kowalski represented a district with some of Kucinich's most dedicated supporters in the mayoral election, so it was no surprise when Kucinich was elected to fill the vacancy.
The Kucinich who returned to the Cleveland City Council was not the same firebrand who had antagonized and frustrated the council as mayor. He so abandoned his confrontational style that Council President George Forbes said at the time, "He's not the same person. He has done a good job on the council. I have a lot of respect for him."It was widely thought that Kucinich would easily win re-election to the City Council in 1985. Instead, he embarked on a year-long effort to become Ohio's Governor. At first intending to challenge Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste for the party nomination, he later pledged to run as an independent. But lacking funds for his campaigns and known statewide as the mayor who led Cleveland to a default, Kucinich made little progress and withdrew altogether in August of 1986.
During the years following his abandoned gubernatorial campaign, Kucinich had little luck in politics. In 1988 and 1992 he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and lost both times. He was more successful as a businessman. In 1987 he founded K Communications, later renamed Kucinich Communications, which provided consulting services, produced industrial videos and brokered media time for its clients. In the early 1990s, Kucinich worked as the international marketing director for a start-up software business named CRC International Business Solutions, which dealt in multi-lingual accounting software.
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