[Peace-discuss] Kucinich…

[Morton K. Brussel]

FYI. Paul Street sours on Kucinich, and like Nader, prefers Edwards  
among the rest.  --mmkb

ZNet | Activism

Goodbye Dennis:
Kucinich Sells Out to Obama, Inc.

by Paul Street; Iowa Campaign Report; January 02, 2008


Barack Obama has excluded himself from the progressive coalition by  
the statements he’s made, unfortunately.  He’s a lot smarter than his  
public statements, which are extremely conciliatory  to concentrated  
power and big business...The people of Iowa and New Hampshire have to  
ask themselves: who is going to fight for you...Edwards raises the  
question of the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands that  
are working against the majority of people.


- Ralph Nader, MSNBC, December 17, 2007


For some time now, I’ve been giving a quiet and indirect sort of  
tribute to Dennis Kucinich.  I’ve been praising him for backing  
progressive policy proposals and initiatives that  
“mainstream” (corporate) Democrats refuse to embrace: single-payer  
health insurance, de-funding the illegal occupation of Iraq,  
investigating civilian Iraqi casualties, the impeachment of Cheney- 
Bush and so on. I’ve been mentioning him as the only truly Left  
candidate in the Democratic presidential race.

And all the while a little voice in the back of my mind has been  
saying, “but you know he’s really kind of a pathetic jerk who helps  
make the Left look stupid.”

I don’t know when the voice started.  Maybe it was when I heard about  
how he saw a UFO. Or when I heard him brag to a political audience  
that his vegan diet permitted him to be married to a woman half his  
age – a model he recruited through a truly bizarre public relations  
campaign.

At some point it started to sink in that Kucinich was a knucklehead  
who cares more about advancing his own goofy and grandiose personal  
agenda than about furthering the causes of  peace, democracy, and  
justice.  I also realized that Dennis helped corporate media  
discredit Left sentiments and values by associating them with  
clownish narcissism, cultish mysticism, and laughable irrelevance.

And now I feel freer than ever to say all this for a very simple  
reason.  Dennis has done something truly and unforgivably pathetic,  
petty, and reactionary. He has told his admittedly small number of  
followers in Iowa to give their second-choice votes to the corporate  
media candidate and imperial war Democrat Barack Obama during the  
pivotal 2008 Democratic Party caucus to be held today.

He has essentially lent his support to the class- and race- 
accommodator Obama, Dennis’ supposed fellow “change agent.”

The contrast with the much more principled and serious Left leader  
Ralph Nader is pronounced. Two weeks ago, Nader endorsed John Edwards  
as a real corporation-fighting progressive and rejected Obama in a  
fascinating MSNBC “Hardball” interview with Chris Mathews (see http:// 
www.youtube. com/watch? v=CLzytK6A3Fc).

"The key phrase" in Edwards message, Nader said,  is "that he doesn't  
want to replace a corporate Republican with a corporate Democrat.  
That's very key."

Nader noted that Edwards' message of fighting corporate power is more  
stridently left than anything he's seen from an electable Democratic  
politician in a very long time.  According to Nader, "people in Iowa  
and New Hampshire have to ask themselves a question: who's going to  
fight for you?" The answer, for Nader, is Edwards.

At one point Mathews told Nader he’d “excluded Obama from the  
progressive coalition." Nader argued that Obama has “excluded himself  
with statements that he’s made, unfortunately. He’s a lot smarter  
than his public statements, which are extremely conciliatory to  
concentrated power and big business.”

Nader told Mathews that Edwards “raises the question of the  
concentration of power and wealth and power in a few hands that are  
working against the majority of people.”

Last Monday, in a Muscatine, Iowa press conference, Nader deepened  
his support for Edwards. “The issue is corporate power and who  
controls our political system,” Nader said, “and it’s not who has  
experience for six years or two years.”  This was an obvious allusion  
to the ongoing debate over “experience” between Clinton and Obama.

Nader called Edwards a Democratic “glimmer of hope.”  He issued a  
public statement ripping Mrs. Clinton as a “corporate Democrat,”  
mirroring the precise term Edwards uses to describe Hillary and Obama.

Nader praised Edwards’ more combative and populist posture of  
fighting corporate power as a heartening signal. “It’s the only time  
I’ve heard a Democrat talk that way in a long time,” claimed Nader,  
who rarely praises a leading Democrat.

“Iowa should decide which candidate stands for us,” Nader added,  
saying that “Edwards is at least highlighting day after day that the  
issue is who controls our country, big business or the people” (see  
David Paul Kuhne, “Nader Throws Support to Edwards, Blasts Clinton,”  
Common Dreams, January 1, 2008 at http://www.commondreams.org/archive/ 
2008/01/01/6100/print/)

Nader is correct and Dennis is terribly wrong.

The admittedly imperfect (from a Left perspective) John Edwards is  
considerably better than Obama in ways that matter The unabashedly  
partisan, pro-labor, anti-poverty, and “”Jeffersonian” Edwards is  
running to the Hamiltonian Obama’s “populist” and democratic left.

It’s a bigger contrast than many progressives know or let on. Obama  
intones endlessly about “hope” and finding “common ground” and  
“consensus” with Republicans, evangelicals, and big business.  He  
decries the nation’s supposedly horrid legacy of factional and  
ideological conflict – an allegedly frightening heritage he pins on  
the purportedly scary (late) 1960s – and claims to represent a new  
generational politics seeking to “get things done” above nasty old  
divisions. He claims to represent the glories of an America where  
hard work is rewarded and anyone can rise from the bottom (where he  
supposedly originated) to the top. He tells Wall Street’s global  
investor class (during an oration last summer at NASDAQ's  
headquarters) of his purported beliefs that “you are as open and  
willing to listen as anyone else in America ” and that “your work  
[is] be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just  
America. I think,” Obama absurdly adds, “the problem is that no one  
has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal.”

Yeah, okay.

Sounding like a droning academic on many occasions, professor Obama  
has been known to put more than a few of his audience members to sleep.

Meanwhile, Edwards has been delivering a steady diet of red-hot  
orations against business rule. Deploying the best stump speech in  
the campaign, he refers repeatedly to the labor movement as “the  
greatest anti-poverty program in American history.”  He is willing to  
lose corporate sponsorship and media fancy in his determination to  
make “ending poverty” and fighting economic inequality and “corporate  
domination” of American politics and policy the rhetorical  
cornerstones of his campaign.

In the place of Obama’s tiresome feel-good homilies to togetherness  
and shared American values and empathy, Edwards declares that his  
mission as president would be to give privileged corporate and  
business elites “Hell.” He promises to battle and defeat big business  
to make policy in democratic accord with a popular consensus that  
already exists for things like universal health care and fair trade.  
He says it’s a “lie” that “any Democrat is better than any  
Republican,” arguing that replacing big money “corporate Republicans”  
with big money “corporate Democrats” is just a game of musical  
chairs. He (rightly in my opinion) mocks Obama’s great healing  
narrative as singing “Kumbaya” and makes no bones about disliking the  
Republican right.

His generational narrative is that the next generation of Americans  
is about to be the first in U.S. history to be worse off than its  
immediate predecessor. Passive Democrats who refuse to fight  
“corporate greed” to “reclaim our democracy” should look their  
children in the eyes, Edwards says, and "admit that they  did nothing  
to stop the decline of opportunity and the growing inequality of  
wealth and power.”

Edwards’ autobiographical narrative skips the Horatio Alger claims of  
heroic upward mobility.  It simply states that he’s running for  
president on behalf of the working-class people he grew up with in  
rural North Carolina . Their hard work was not rewarded, he says,  
when their local textile mill closed so that its corporate owners  
could exploit cheaper labor abroad.

Edwards rejects the notion that any but a small minority of Americans  
can to rise from poverty to riches under current economic and  
political arrangements.  He takes little personal credit for his own  
ascendancy to wealth.

His campaign’s concept of the division that plagues America is  
different from Obama’s. Obama has hitched his quest for power on a  
pledge to save the virtuous (Alexander) Hamiltonian Republic by  
reaching out across the supposed great divide between “red  
state” (white-patriarchal and more rural, evangelical and militarist)  
Republicans and “blue state” (more multi-colored, feminist, gay- 
friendly and urban-cosmopolitan) Democrats. By sharp and relevant  
(for actual progressives) contrast, Edwards speaks in (Thomas)  
Jeffersonian terms about the more real and fundamental fissure in the  
U.S: the split between the public and the country’s corporate-based  
power centers. He advocates “fighting and beating” those power  
centers on behalf of working people and the cause of popular governance.

He’s even better on race than Obama. As Obama’s fellow black Chicago  
South Sider Jesse Jackson, Sr. noted in the Chicago Sun Times last  
November: “The Democratic candidates – with the exception of John  
Edwards, who opened his campaign in New Orleans and has made  
addressing poverty central to his campaign – have virtually ignored  
the plight of African Americans in this country”.

It’s not for nothing that volunteers from the Service Employers  
International Union (SEIU), UNITE-HERE, the United Steelworkers, the  
Carpenters, and other unions are working overtime for Edwards in Iowa  
between now and the Caucus.  And it’s not for nothing that Nader has  
endorsed Edwards and rejected Obama.

For more details on the differences (and how remarkably conservative  
and corporate-friendly Obama is), please see my following articles:

  “ ‘Angry John’ and KumbayObama: Reflections on Iowa, Business Rule,  
and the Democratic Party’s Democratic Disconnect,” ZNet (December 20,  
2007)(http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/15969)

“Why I’ve Focused on Obama: Seven Points,” ZNet (December 29, 2007),  
read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16046

“Obama Speaks: ‘Oh Great White Masters, You Just Haven’t Been Asked  
to Help America,” ZNet (December 12, 2007), read at
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/15801

“Obama’s Role: to Confuse and Divide the Progressive Base,” ZNet  
(October 19, 2007), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/ 
viewArticle/15602

Why has the avowed left-progressive Dennis Kucinich embraced the  
corporate-centrist Obama (justly rejected in no uncertain terms by  
the iconic progressive Nader) over the labor-populist Edwards  
(embraced by Nader)?  My guess is that Edwards helped create this  
sorry episode by letting himself be overheard (last summer) agreeing  
with Hillary that lesser candidates (like Kucinich and Mike Gravel)  
were messing up the presidential debates.

That was a bad and authoritarian thing to say - and think. It is  
corporate media (whose God-like power Edwards dares not criticize in  
an election season) that most relevantly poisons the debates and the  
campaigns overall and Left candidates need to be heard.

Still, it's no reason for a left politician to jump into political  
bed with the deeply conservative Obama phenomenon.

Dennis may perceive the corporate media BaRoackStar as an unstoppable  
political juggernaut and figure that he might as well jump on the  
Obama train while he can.

Maybe he thinks Barack will let him set up his cherished Department  
of Peace. No chance.

I can’t  believe Dennis actually thinks that “Obama, Inc.” is a  
progressive change agent. But then, when you believe in UFOs, all  
kinds of bizarre cognitions are possible.

Goodbye, Dennis. You seem to like fantasies, so you should have some  
good fun with your new best friend Barack Obama. Fantasy is what he’s  
all about.

Veteran radical historian Paul Street is a writer, speaker and  
activist based in Iowa City, IA and Chicago, IL.  He is the author of  
Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO:  
Paradigm); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York:  
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Segregated Schools: Educational  
Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005.  
Paul can be reached at paulstreet99 at yahoo.com.
  
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