http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/04/AR2007120402333_2.html?sid=ST200712040247". . .Dennis Kucinich is the happiest candidate in this race. True, he is polling in the low single digits, doing about as well as he did during his 2004 presidential run.
snip
Oldest of seven. Grew up so poor in working-class Cleveland that the family sometimes had to sleep in the car. As a kid, he scrubbed floors and shined shoes. He and his siblings lived briefly in an orphanage. He was short, he stuttered, he had asthma, and he had Crohn's disease, a chronic and painful inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. In high school, he played varsity football at 4-foot-9 and 89 pounds. (His teammates tossed him into a garbage can.) When he was 21, doctors removed eight feet of his small bowel and colon. He worked his way through college and a master's degree in speech communications, and then he worked his way through the Cleveland City Council and the city post of clerk of the courts. In 1977, at age 31, he was elected "boy mayor" of the city.
snip
A feisty and combative populist, Kucinich is comfortable as an underdog, which may explain why he sees that flap about his UFO sighting in David-and-Goliath terms. He's still thinking of things he should've said in response to Tim Russert, the moderator who asked him about it during an October debate. He's convinced Russert was trying to "smear" him out of pressure from his corporate bosses at NBC and NBC's owner, GE, who fear his antiwar stance. (He believes this also explains why Russert hasn't invited him on "Meet the Press" in years.) (Here's his account of the UFO: Twenty-five years ago, he saw three objects in the sky over MacLaine's house in Graham, Wash. He says he doesn't know what they were. MacLaine, who believes in alien visitations and has claimed that in a past life she was emperor Charlemagne's lover, recently wrote a book saying that when Dennis saw the UFO he "heard directions in his mind." Kucinich says that part isn't true.)
snip
Dennis Kucinich is for reducing the country's carbon footprint, ending the war, establishing a universal not-for-profit health-care system, withdrawing from the World Trade Organization and impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney. In front of a group of 100 in the tiny village of Center Sandwich, he speaks of "human unity," invokes Wordsworth and reads from his pocket-size Constitution. Elizabeth watches from the front row with a beatific smile.
He's in the midst of a long, wayward answer to an audience member's question about environmental stewardship when Elizabeth raises her hand to help him out. Dennis lets her take the floor. Elizabeth has been campaigning full time for her husband; she considers America her cause these days. She has the ability -- rare even among practiced politicians -- to speak extemporaneously in full paragraphs, without rambling or backtracking. Now she gives a succinct, eloquent speech about the need for new environmentally friendly technologies and sustainable architecture.
snip
After their first meeting that day in his office -- that Dennis hoped was soul recognition, but feared was wishful thinking -- Elizabeth walked out of the Longworth Building, found a place to sit and read the paper he had given her. It was his proposed billto establish a Department of Peace. She thought it was amazing. Dennis understood the "interconnectedness and interdependence" of humanity.
"I didn't expect the bill should actually be so . . . conscious," she says.
snip
The happiest presidential candidate laughs and laughs."
A really great article to read on a day when the Repubs are pandering to the clueless evangelicals. These two are truly enlightened.
edited to add a quotation mark. . .yikes
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
