The Kucinich Conundrum

[banana republican]

Remember that kid in high school who ran for class president, the one who wasn't popular, who didn't have money or dress well or even make a decent hallway poster? Now imagine if he sticks to it so long he starts to win. And by the time he's 23, he's a city councilman in Cleveland. At 31, he's the country's youngest big city mayor. All this success, you figure, would make his skin glow a little, his suits a bit spiffier, his speeches a little punchier. But what if he was so damn earnest that it didn't? What if at 60 he still looked and sounded like Dennis Kucinich?

You would make fun of him. And you did.

But Kucinich--a six-term Congressman who is running for President despite consistently coming in last in the 2004 primaries and first in talk-show monologues--doesn't care. Because he's so sure that what he's been saying for four years is right--he's for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, ratifying Kyoto, universal health care--he's convinced there's a moment coming, some event or speech or interview, when voters will suddenly realize he's not a joke: "When people see what I have to say, they go, 'Hey, wait. He's right about the war. Ha-ha. He's right about health care. Ha-ha.'" Kucinich believes deeply in the coming of this grand American epiphany even if no one outside his tiny camp does. "How can you take someone seriously that led us to war and not take someone seriously who stood for peace? It's a commentary on where we are as a society," he says. "Do we value celebrity over truth?"


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595243,00.html