http://www.newsobserver.com/politics/story/791896.htmlKucinich mixes street smarts with controversial style
Democrat has loyal followers
David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Day after day, 12-year-old Dennis Kucinich wore the same pair of turquoise blue pinstriped pants to school.
Other kids teased him about the pants, which he'd bought for a quarter at a Salvation Army store, but Kucinich had nothing else to wear. Finally, a nun at his school told him to stay after class and gave him and his family boxes of clothes.
"It was an extraordinary act of charity," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a recent interview. "Every step along the way there were people there to help us."
Kucinich, 61, is a product of west Cleveland, a middle-class urban community that thrived when America's factories were humming, but has been struggling to survive for at least a generation.
Like so many Rust Belt ethnic enclaves the congressman's district is still largely populated by scrappers, people who worked with their hands and lived by their wits and relied heavily on their governments for safety nets and jobs when times were bad.
It has long been a place where politicians are friends, neighbors and favor-dispensers. Maintaining that street-level sense has been the key to Kucinich's rocky yet ultimately triumphant political career, one that saw him become mayor of Cleveland in 1977, at age 31, then saw him nearly recalled from office as the media mocked him as "Dennis the Menace."
He took risks
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http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071123/NEWS/711230429/-1/rss02Kucinich touts courage, judgment
By Peter Sutters
[email protected] November 23, 2007 6:00 AM
PORTSMOUTH — Answering questions by reading passages from his book, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich sought to connect his poverty-stricken upbringing with his ability to make tough decisions.
"If you read this book, one of the things you'll figure out is, because of the way I grew up, in a tough situation, it has created in me a kind of steeliness, an ability to take a stand against the odds," said Kucinich at the RiverRun Bookstore. "To have the clarity in the moment not to be pushed and just to do the right thing, you learn that in a life time; you learn courage over a life time."
The remarks came after Kucinich took a swipe at his fellow democratic rivals on their past votes for the authorization of the war in Iraq or subsequent votes approving funding for the war, saying, "You're electing judgment when you're electing a president, you're not electing a smile, a gliding hand, a floating image. You're electing the judgment of a person. Out of all the candidates, it was the judgment that I demonstrated in a moment of crisis that showed the capacity to take America in the right direction.
"The others haven't shown that. They were wrong about the war. Some of them led the effort for the war, some led the effort for the Patriot Act, and at least one said he was opposed to the war before the war, but then when he got to the Senate, he voted with Senator Clinton almost 100 percent of the time," said Kucinich.
A mostly friendly crowd jammed into the book store listening to Kucinich read from his book, answer a few questions and then sit to sign copies of his book, "The Courage To Survive."
"I thought his talk was good," said Naoufal Souitat. "His story makes you feel like he is one of us. He didn't have a special upbringing."
"His upbringing sheds some light on why he takes the positions he does," said Kevin Jerram.
Kucinich said he hopes to be in the top three in the New Hampshire primary and to carry the momentum to the following states.
"If we can move up to the top three in New Hampshire, it will change the race," said Kucinich. "We have to be ready to organize millions of people who see that, 'Hey, he has a chance.' That pent-up desire to participate, we have to have a system in place to deal with that."
He added that the Internet would be the best way to get more people involved and asked the crowd to send ideas on how to accomplish that.
<snip>
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071121/FRONTPAGE/711210317/0/NEWS04Kucinich not short on confidence
He spreads an unapologetically liberal message
By RAY DUCKLER
Monitor staff
November 21. 2007 12:25AM
Dennis Kucinich is short. Always has been. He could barely see over the center's butt as a backup quarterback at St. John Cantius High in Cleveland. His wife, Elizabeth, an eye-catching redhead, is 5 inches taller, without heels.
His opponents in the democratic run for the White House also tower over the congressman from Ohio. All 5-foot-7 of him.
But there was Kucinich yesterday at Concord High, making his height a plus in the school auditorium. Yes, he's small, he told the students. And we all know that voters often attach weight to height, as though taller means stronger.
But Kucinich made his high school varsity football team, beating the odds like he's trying to do now in his run for the presidency. He was a 4-9, 97-pound freshman. Check the football card he handed out yesterday, the one with him posing with the rest of the team. He's middle front, looking half his age, by far the littlest member of the squad.
"When I showed up, the coach said, 'Look, you're kind of small and if you get hurt, I'm in trouble, so you're not going to be able to play on this team,' " Kucinich told the packed auditorium. "I said to him, 'Give me a chance and I'll show you.' "
<snip>
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2888/81 The Heroics Of Dennis J. Kucinich
Maryann Mann
He’s short, right? Kinda weird looking? A close friend of mind described Dennis J. Kucinich with rare jocularity following a recent Democratic presidential debate: “He reminded me of a nebbish, privileged student council member”. I actually had to smile at that one. As witty as my friend’s remark was (and it did make me smile), my grin was born from two very different places: One, a place of remarkable admiration, the other a place of very deep regret.
My admiration for Dennis Kucinich begins with the authenticity of a man who seems possessed of a deft, preternatural ability to resist coercive political pressure and acquiescence to the special-interest briberies which have co-opted Washington D.C. Even David Brooks, conservative columnist for The New York Times, went so far as to stamp the Ohio Congressman as an “aging prodigy”.
Here are five major points to consider:
1.) Dennis Kucinich was right on Iraq. The Congressman stood up to ideological war hawks, refusing to submit to the constitutional calamity of a preemptive invasion.
2.) He was right on the Patriot Act. Kucinich lambasted the serpentine piece of legislation acting as a gateway to eroding our cherished civil liberties.
3.) The Congressman is right on health care. Unlike slipshod “universal coverage” plans proposed by Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama (all of which attempt to incurably fix a broken, private system by virtually mandating that every American buy into it) Kucinich knows first hand that the only morally and economically satisfying version of health care is the one beginning with the words: not-for-profit.
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http://www.esquire.com/features/kucinich1107..and a seven page profile:
Features
It's Kucinich Time!
Fanfare for the common man. And for his lovely wife, Elizabeth.
By Scott Raab
The pure products of America go crazy," wrote William Carlos Williams -- antipoet of "the thing itself" -- but Dr. Williams was from north Jersey, and as far as I know never strayed to Cleveland, whose own pure products long have been flame tempered, union made, and born batshit insane. So when I tell you that Dennis Kucinich is first of all a sane, sane man, and secondly, fit to be president -- and thirdly: It's Kucinich time, now, because what this blue-balled, war-thwacked nation needs is not another scleroid corporate whore but a sixty-one-year-old vegan peacemonger, poor beyond corruption and honest as spit, hauling balls big enough to both choke Dick Cheney and keep a smile like a woozy kitten's on the love-lit face of a twenty-nine-year-old heartthrob wife; and if not now, when? and if not Dennis, who? -- when I tell you this hand over heart and cheek untongued, then it behooves me also to say that I am a son of the same crooked flaming river, Cleveland-born and -bred and unashamed.
But this is another pungent river in another town -- the slate-gray Piscataqua in Portsmouth, New Hampshire -- on a cool May Saturday morning gravid with rain, where five hundred or so union members, families in tow, have gathered in a small park to protest a proposed $2.7 billion deal that would let Verizon spin off its rural New England landline customers to a much smaller outfit in North Carolina, saving Verizon a sweet half billion tax dollars, plus the bother of an expiring union contract, plus the cost of pensions, not to mention the messy, unprofitable matter of bringing broadband to the rubes. It'll also hand Verizon six of the nine directors' seats on the little company's board -- the pickpocket's bump that bares the scam. It is, in short, the sort of humdrum money grab that makes shareholders drool and Kucinich spew lava.
He looks small as he strolls through the crowd and takes the makeshift plywood stage, standing short and thin under a blue awning, wearing a ratty tan raincoat, a twelve-year-old boy's haircut, and a crooked grin as he lowers the microphone and barks, "Good morning!"
A few in the crowd answer, but it's a safe bet that even they know nothing but his name, if that, and have never heard his voice. It is not the voice of a presidential hopeful -- it doesn't emit Hillary's frozen cheer, drip Edwards's honey, or ooze Obamanic earnestness. It's a four-seam fastball, high and tight, buzzing straight at the ear.
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