Give Dennis a Chance

Most people I know never even take the time to read Kucinich's campaign platform.

Anyway, I'm not saying that he's my guy for sure, or that he's completely perfect. Come on, he's tiny and maybe slightly Napoleonic. But the "electability" escape is an insult to our faculties of reason. You know what, people could make Kucinich electable: he's got perfectly sensible stances on the issues, he's experienced, he's tough, and he's been a fighter his whole life. But if nobody makes any noise, the media coverage defaults to people like Bush and Hillary and Obama because they're they've got the most celebrity status. Plain and simple.

For people who don't think Kucinich is genuine, check out his record. He was a strong opponent of the Iraq war from the start, unlike Hillary. He and Gravel are the only full supporters of gay marriage, which is the only genuinely liberal position on the matter. His efforts as mayor of Cleveland standing up to the Cleveland Trust Company sent him into "political Siberia," only to be applauded years later when it became clear that he was right.

Now to the issues:

I'm not sure what the Wikipedians meant by "free love," but I'm sure Kucinich could find a more politically correct way to express his policy. If he's for removing antiquated legal barriers to unrestricted sexual behavior, then I'd guess that the majority of young people -- not just in the north, but across the country -- would find his policy appealing. Can any liberal American honestly say that certain types of (non-coerced) should be banned? Also, it was our parents' generation -- the now-powerful baby boomers -- who invented free love! And besides, we're talking about winning the Democratic nomination, not charming every single voter in every corner of every state.

I'm not sure what to say about reparations -- maybe Pfoho people who have thought about the issue more could chime in -- but I definitely think they are worth considering. Even if they aren't the best idea, I am very much in support of creative thinking for combating the lasting racial inequities, beyond affirmative action and British-style rigid schooling and testing (by that I mean No Child Left Behind and the KIPP etc. schools that are its champions. They are frighteningly strict and anti-progressive me.)

About Iraq, I think that an international peacekeeping force is the only way to go, and it has to be strong and fierce, but much less American and partisan. Clearly, abandoning the country would leave it in utter chaos, and this isn't what Kucinich is advocating. But keeping American forces there will perpetuate the notion that Americans are occupiers and not peacekeepers. My best hope is that an international force could more effectively do something like what Charles de Gaulle did in Senegal when it was considering independence -- organize a national referendum, giving citizens the option to choose either a particular system of government and power structure imposed by the UN, or to have all the forces pull out and leave the country in perpertual chaos. I still harbor hope that the ravaged citizens could choose order. Either way, the US could never pull such a move off on its own.

Visas and immigration are complicated and require quite a bit more investigation. I asked my mom, who happens to be an immigration lawyer, about the L-1 visa, and she said that it really is being exploited a lot by foreign companies, even though it also serves a perfectly permissible purpose. What it's supposed to do is allow experts about specific business or technology to cross borders to train branches of multinational corporation. What some Indian companies do is they create nominal but useless branches in the US, then send their employees to work here on L-1 visas, which means they can get paid a ton more than they would in India. To eliminate the visas altogether might be extreme, but to brush off the issue entirely is worse.

Finally, Kucinich supports impeaching Cheney, which I think is an honorable thing to do. Cheney is a crook and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law. To get Cheney on an orderly show trial would help us heal the wounds that he and Bush created, and help us pass more of the blame for the Iraq mess on their shoulders, since they are the ones who masterminded the malicious deception about WMDs in the first place.

We have to resist celebrity worship and other regressive heuristics if we want our most important decisions -- voting included -- to mean anything.