Posted by Denise Grollmus
on December 9, 2007, 3:01 pm
24.165.172.244
How Dennis Kucinich remade himself from race-baiting bomb-thrower to liberal sweetheart.
By Denise Grollmus
It was December 1978, the darkest period in Cleveland history.
Just a year earlier, 31-year-old Dennis Kucinich had been elected mayor. Now the city was in bankruptcy. Six hundred jobs had been slashed, including 400 policemen and firefighters. The neighborhood development corporations, once the backbone of Cleveland's renewal, had been drained of their funding. And City Hall had been overrun with an army of novitiates, whose qualifications began and ended with their loyalty to the mayor.
The man charged with averting disaster was the city's 24-year-old finance director, whose only work experience was a nine-month stint at Merrill Lynch. The acting police chief was a 21-year-old college coed with wispy bangs. The inevitable implosion of Kucinich's scorched-earth rise to mayor had arrived.
As a city councilman, he had climbed the ranks of Cleveland politics through a strategy of nonstop combat, fighting everyone from colleagues to businessmen, bankers to bureaucrats. He accused them of being corrupt, lazy, and unsympathetic to the city's white working class — his largest sect of voters. If council was for tax abatements, Kucinich accused them of being in the pocket of business. If they wanted housing for the East Side's black poor, he castigated them for ignoring the West Side's ethnic whites. If you weren't with him, you were his enemy, and Kucinich spared no sound bites in illuminating your sins.
"It's not every day in Cleveland or any other city that you have the mayor calling the city council a bunch of lunatics and buffoons," says Brent Larkin, The Plain Dealer's editorial director, who covered Kucinich's reign for the now-defunct Cleveland Press. "You don't call everybody a bunch of ####ing crooks, and that's what he did."
Kucinich may have been right about corruption and lethargy, but he was now proving to be a much worse alternative. After all, a mayor's job is a yeoman's task, about paving streets and ensuring safety. But Kucinich had allowed style to manhandle substance; he was against everything, rather than providing solutions of his own.
"If you are mayor, you have to do things," says Mike Roberts, The Plain Dealer's former city editor. "There was nothing that he did of any success, unless it was self-serving."
City dwellers who could afford to flee did so in droves. Everyone else was holding on for dear life. "The town had a nervous breakdown during [Kucinich's] mayoralty," Larkin says. "He wore everybody out."
Yet almost 30 years later, Kucinich has managed to recast this period as his greatest triumph. In the revised telling, this isn't a story of a mayor who hurled the city into chaos with startling swiftness. It's a rewritten David and Goliath tale, with Kucinich playing the role as the only man with the cojones to stand up to corruption and nefarious corporations. His presidential campaign paints a man of sturdy principles, unsinkable optimism, and untainted liberal bona fides — a mythology now being regurgitated by everyone from supporters to the national media.
The "people's mayor," he is called. The "worker's president," he dubs himself.
"It's Kucinich time, now," wrote Cleveland native Scott Raab in his gushing Esquire profile.
"Kucinich has made a life and career of overcoming obstacles, challenging expectations and making unpopular decisions simply by trusting his gut," lavished the Chicago Tribune.
But if history tells us anything, it's that Kucinich will play any role to his advantage — be it race-baiter or liberal purist — only to spin himself a new image the next day. It's a formula that hasn't changed in 40 years.
"He has done a spectacular job of rewriting history," Larkin says. ". . . You can neither understand nor appreciate Dennis unless you were here then. You had to have lived through it — and, God, it was incredible."
His ambition was evident from the start: Before Kucinich was even in high school, he'd already penned a 30-page autobiography. It detailed the life of a working-class kid — son of an Irish mother and a Croatian truck-driving father. He was the eldest of seven children, who sometimes found themselves living out of the family car whenever Dad couldn't find work.
After graduating from St. John Cantius High School, 17-year-old Kucinich moved out of his family's home on East 71st Street and into a $50-a-month apartment on the outskirts of Tremont.
At the time, the neighborhood was a fiercely Catholic area, where Polish and Hungarian were spoken as often as English. These were the days when Cleveland wasn't merely divided by race, but by myriad ethnic rivalries. White people weren't simply "white," but Italian, Romanian, or Greek. And the people of Tremont believed they were getting the shortest end of the stick, ignored at the behest of Irish and black.
In 1967, just five days before he was old enough to vote, Kucinich filed petitions to run for City Council. He lost by 500 votes to the neighborhood's nine-term incumbent, John Bilinski.
Kucinich kept himself busy with classes at Cleveland State, morning shifts as a surgical technician at St. Alexis Hospital, and evening stints as a copy boy at The Plain Dealer. At the end of a workweek, he easily logged 80 hours.
Roberts, then The PD's city editor, remembers Kucinich zigzagging between desks, his pint-size fists snapping up pages of typewritten copy amid clouds of chain smoke. It was here that Kucinich learned his love of ink — a tutorial in big-city media that would serve him for decades to come, for better or worse.
"I remember him talking about his life, whether he was going to be a politician or a reporter," Roberts says. "He was so smart and observant. He knew how reporters thought and how they developed stories. He realized he was smarter than reporters. He quickly saw the media for what it was — not some monolith, but a system of flawed human beings."
Yet the diminutive copy boy wasn't cut out for the wild ways of '60s newspaper life. Reporters often ribbed him about his intolerance for booze. So in the spring of 1968, Kucinich challenged them to a martini-chugging contest at the Rockwell Inn. He bet he could drink 10 in 30 minutes.
"This could kill him," the bartender said.
"Probably," a reporter responded.
Kucinich made good on his bet, downing the drinks in 27 minutes before heading out to the curb to puke. As a result, he underwent major stomach surgery that fall, ending his drinking — and his newspaper days.
It was for the best. Kucinich had already learned all he needed to know.
In 1969, Kucinich decided to run again for council. This time, the 23-year-old pitched himself as the shepherd of the "forgotten people," his new catchphrase for the Eastern Europeans of the near West Side.
He'd taken a lesson from former Mayor and Ohio Governor Frank Lausche, the first Eastern European Clevelander to hit the political big time. Lausche's success was largely due to his ability to win the "ethnic vote" — the vast yet isolated bloc of Eastern European immigrants, who felt ignored by Irish, black, and Italian politicians. Lausche's speeches were as much about Slovenian heritage as they were about public policy.
So Kucinich hawked his own Croatian ethnicity, constantly narrating his trials as the son of a practically homeless truck driver, careful to avoid any mention of his Irish mother. If Tremont didn't like the city's black incumbents, neither did Kucinich. If they hated tax abatements for business, so did he.
He would arrive at the Greek Orthodox church with a Hellenistic quote, then drive to the Alliance of Poles hall, where he'd shout, "Ja cie kocham!" — "I love you" in Polish.
This time, Kucinich beat Bilinski by a mere 16 votes.
He had discovered the key to Cleveland's electoral politics — or at least the one that suited him best. His rhetoric was rarely about getting things done, but rather railing against those who could. And his favorite target was Carl Stokes.
In 1967, Stokes became the first black mayor of a major American city, rising up from the poverty of an East Side housing project. Kucinich's constituents weren't fans of black people in general, and feared their emerging power would focus the city's resources on black wards, just as white ethnic politicians had always done with their own wards.
Kucinich fed their distrust, constantly denouncing Stokes for reverse racism. "[Kucinich] learned to play dirty pool," John Metcalf, a longtime Plain Dealer copy editor, was quoted as saying in a 1977 Cleveland magazine article. "Hell, there are a lot of ethnics out there who want to keep the niggers on their side of the river. There are a lot of bigots in that district, and someone has to represent them, let's face it."
One of Kucinich's first major targets was Community Development Director Richard Greene. The local news aired footage of a red-faced Kucinich standing on the Council floor, railing against the Stokes ally. He accused Greene of being overpaid and incompetent, citing the $29,400-a-year director's plans for a 447-unit East Side housing development. Why did West Siders have to pay for black housing, when they were barely able to make their own rent?
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