The Right Man For President...

... Who would never be President.



Little Big Man

HE IS THE OLDEST of seven children and was raised in Cleveland in 21 apartments, plus a few cars, by the time he was 17. His father, though a Teamster, barely got by. The children were drilled to flee when the landlord appeared since his parents often could get housing only by lying about the size of the family. Kucinich likes to recall sleeping with his family in a car in Industrial Valley, watching steel mills shoot flames into the night. He attended Catholic schools, and the belief that the world is built on a moral floor underscores all of his political utterances. When he was about 12, his parents left him and his siblings at an orphanage for five months. He is a babble of inner-city tongues: In three days raising money in Los Angeles, he used Hebrew, Croatian, Italian, and Spanish. "You just have to ride bus 84 in Cleveland," he tells me. He may be the only candidate who put himself through college, working two jobs. As Jim Trakas, Republican chairman of the Cleveland area, explains, "He has this sense that George W. Bush is exactly what he is not. Dennis Kucinich has never had an easy day in his life."



In 1977, at age 31, he was elected mayor of Cleveland by 3,000 votes, the youngest person ever to hold such office in a major American city. He ran on a platform of saving the city's struggling municipal power company. The local banks, heavily committed to the competing private utility, offered him a deal: sell the municipal system and they would make his mayoralty easy. Kucinich claims that as he sat in that meeting what he really heard in his head was a childhood memory of his parents counting pennies on a chipped porcelain table in the kitchen. He turned down the deal, the banks cut off the city's credit, and the city went into default. He also convinced a lot of voters he was an arrogant punk. He went on live television to can the police chief he'd hired, survived a recall after only nine months in office by a mere 236 votes, and had to add a bulletproof vest to his wardrobe so he could toss out the first pitch at a Cleveland Indians game. Kucinich became a one-term mayor in a city where Democrats outnumbered Republicans 8 to 1. He left office tagged as "Dennis the Menace" and labeled by one Cleveland Press columnist as a "brutal, vain, yappy, little demagogue." A panel of historians would later declare him to be the seventh worst mayor in American history. For 15 years he was a political nobody, a nobody who repeatedly tried for elected office. In 1982, he made $38, and finally, he had to move out of Ohio to earn a living. Somewhere in the lost years he failed at his second marriage (he has one daughter) and became a vegan.



Eventually, the City Council that helped destroy him admitted he was right in a public ceremony. The municipal power company was never sold and this fact has saved Cleveland residents hundreds of millions in low rates. In 1994, Kucinich rode the change in public opinion to the Ohio state Senate; two years later he made it to the U.S. House of Representatives using a lightbulb as his campaign symbol. Little glimmers of his life seep through cracks in his speeches: his parents counting pennies on the kitchen table -- clink, clink, clink -- his father dying just after retirement with his first Social Security check still uncashed in his pocket. And then there is his handshake, a bone-crushing greeting straight from a rust-belt mill.