The Real Lefty

[redqueen]

To supporters of Dennis Kucinich, there is only one Democrat who should be president

A cartoon in last week's New Yorker showed a bar graph with the heading: "The Mars Primary." The results: Kerry, 1 percent; Edwards, 1 percent; Dean, 3 percent -- Kucinich, 93 percent.
It's not easy being a Dennis Kucinich supporter. The candidate has been pretty much ignored by the media covering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination; what attention is paid to him is often dismissive, even mocking.

Adding insult to injury, his backers say, is the fact that Howard Dean has been cast as the race's "progressive" candidate, while their candidate is the one with the real progressive goods.

It's hard to argue with that point. The Congressman from Ohio voted against the war in Iraq, chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and has made his name working for safety testing of bioengineered foods, workers' rights and international human rights. He supports gay marriage -- none of this separate-but-equal, civil union stuff the other Democratic candidates push in the hopes of finding the safe middle ground. He's calling for the abolition of the Patriot Act, the closing of the School of the Americas and U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA and the WTO, both of which, he says, take too large a toll on workers' rights and the environment.

He's also calling for a radical reshifting of national priorities, taking money from a "bloated" military budget and putting more federal funds into education and a national, single-payer healthcare system.

[AP]

1. Kucinish is where Edwards wants to lead America by the hand.

That's the way I see it.

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

2. the "Space Cadet" slur is *always* used for populists and progressives

I remember Chomsky talking about this 10 years ago - and what do you know, Kucinich gets smeared all the time as "space cadet" "Martian" "from another planet" etc. It's amazing how consistent it is.

I guess it's because Dennis won't let the GOP and DLC *frame* the issues.