Posted by Denise Grollmus
on December 9, 2007, 3:11 pm, in reply to "Re: The King of Spin"
24.165.172.244
It was Easter weekend. Councilman Bill Sullivan's phone wouldn't stop ringing. The callers were livid.
Helen Smith, a West Side housewife, wanted to know how they could get this madman out of office. Tom Campbell, a Cleveland State professor, wanted to chat about how embarrassing the Hongisto affair was for the city. Vince Francioli, who'd headed up a senior-citizens program before being fired by Kucinich, also had an ax to grind.
That Monday, the 20th District Caucus, a small citizens' group, formed to launch a recall of Kucinich. The mayor had been in office less than five months.
Kucinich dismissed the drive as little more than a media conspiracy. He was becoming increasingly paranoid, thanks to numerous death threats being phoned into City Hall. He started wearing a bulletproof vest and posted two patrol cars in front of his home around the clock.
As the trees began to bud, his city was spiraling out of control. Reports showed the city $19.4 million in debt — and that didn't include the Muny Light bill.
Without the media on his side, the mayor was forced to hit the streets to campaign against the recall, making 20 stops a day at parades, carnivals, and meetings, begging his "forgotten people" for their support.
On August 13, Cleveland held its first recall referendum in history. Kucinich survived, but by the slim margin of 236 votes. Once again, ethnic whites had come to his rescue — with the help of a few more promises, whether the mayor could deliver them or not.
"He's just like a brother to us," said Joe Raphael, a retired printer. "Why, during the height of the recall, he came out here to talk to us. He promised us a new $2 million recreation center. He always has time for us."
Yet the worst was yet to come. By the next winter, CEI was headed to federal court, hoping to place Muny Light in receivership. It found an ally in Cleveland Trust, Ohio's largest bank, which not only shared seven directors with CEI, but also held $15 million in loans taken out by the city. Cleveland Trust told Kucinich to sell Muny Light or face default.
Kucinich refused to budge. But instead of explaining Cleveland's painful finances to voters, he fell back on his old rhetoric, accusing the banks and CEI of conspiring against him.
To pay off the debt, he slashed 600 city jobs and proposed a $50 million bond issue.
By this time, he'd torched every ally available — from Irish to black, businessman to bureaucrat. Now that he needed a life raft, there was no one left to call. No one would help a man who so venomously denounced others. All Kucinich could do was play the victim and rage.
"My feeling is that if Dennis had been a decent person and tried to be a progressive influence in the city of Cleveland, the banks might have bent over backwards to help him," Lorton says. "But he was trying to screw everyone, especially the banks, and they weren't going to take it."
At midnight on December 15, 1978, Cleveland became the first city since the Great Depression to default on its loans.
The following year, Kucinich ran for re-election against Republican George Voinovich, hoping that his confrontational politics still held sway with ethnic whites. But no amount of populist preaching could cover the disaster that "the people's mayor" had devised. He was defeated by 11,000 votes.
The 1980s were not kind to Kucinich. After failing to find work in Cleveland, he moved to Los Angeles, earning meager money as a talk-radio host while crashing on Shirley MacLaine's couch and apparently spotting UFOs. In 1982, his tax return claimed just $38 in income. It would be another 15 years before people began rewriting his story.
By then, Muny Light had been re-formed as Cleveland Public Power. CEI was absorbed by FirstEnergy.
The Plain Dealer, which had blasted the mayor's decision not to sell Muny Light, now praised Kucinich for refusing to buckle beneath CEI's pressure, claiming that he'd saved Clevelanders more than $300 million in electrical costs. "On issues pertaining to default, Dennis wasn't all wrong," Larkin says. "Dennis' problem wasn't the substance as much as it was style."
Even Cleveland magazine, which was largely critical of Kucinich, wrote a 1996 editorial praising him for saving the plant. "There is little debate over the value of Muny Light today," it said.
Conveniently forgotten was the fact that Kucinich could have avoided default by simply working with creditors instead of denouncing them. Yet it would mark the beginning of his David and Goliath myth, a story Kucinich has done his best to script ever since.
Soon he was running for Congress, having cast aside his reputation as boy bombaster for the more palatable image of good West Side Catholic. The new Kucinich wasn't a career politician, but a working man himself — pro-labor, pro-family — and naturally against anything his constituents loathed, be it abortion or flag-burning, the morning-after pill or gay marriage.
The myth of the Muny Light fight became his new mantra, with campaign workers passing out bright yellow bumper stickers that read, "Because he was right."
It worked. Kucinich beat incumbent Republican Martin Hoke by 6,000 votes. "His career was in ruins, and everyone with an IQ over 80 said that this guy will never be elected into office again," says Larkin. ". . . It is the most remarkable political comeback I've ever seen, and you have to have some admiration for that."
Kucinich's skills seemed much better suited to Congress. Unlike the mayor's office, the nuts and bolts of governing could be left to 534 other members. Kucinich was free to follow his first love — holding rallies and press conferences.
After a decade in Congress, he remains an outsider, viewed largely as an oddity even within his own party. His legislation is largely written to produce headlines rather than public policy. His most prominent proposal, the Department of Peace, harks back to the promises of his mayor days: filled with rhetorical niceties, but with limited practical application and no mention of cost. In fact, he has yet to have a single bill passed into law.
Yet he retains a keen eye for using the issues of the day to get himself on TV. Style, it seems, still heartily trumps substance. "He makes a lot of noise," Larkin says. "He made a lot of noise about LTV Steel, and now it no longer exists. He made a lot of noise about the hospital, and that no longer exists. He just makes a lot of noise, though he's not as confrontational as he once was."
In 2003, when gas prices were hovering around $1.60 a gallon, he proposed a bill to tax the profits of big energy, contending, "Oil companies are clearly taking advantage of the American people." He's attacked the Cleveland Indians for moving their games to cable, attempted to abolish the death penalty, and most recently sought the impeachment of Dick Cheney.
In each case, his proposals went nowhere. Kucinich hadn't done the groundwork or built the allegiance to make them happen. But he did get his headlines, the kind that remind the "forgotten people" that he's still on their side.
And now he's remade himself again.
With his run for president, Kucinich is no longer catering to the blue-collar West Side, but the American left. He's no longer anti-gay, anti-abortion Cleveland Catholic, but a pro-choice, anti-war vegan bent on being the most liberal of the Democratic field. Ask supporters for his greatest accomplishments, and they'll inevitably raise the myth of Muny Light. But Kucinich carefully avoids the rest of his past.
He's not seen in Cleveland often these days and rarely speaks to the city's media. But when Scene interviewed him in 2003, he grew defensive about his racial politics, claiming it never happened: "I find it offensive that you just said I have a history of race-baiting."
Instead, he continues to polish the modern version of Dennis Kucinich — still the working man, the fighter, the enemy of his constituents' enemies — only this time painted in softer hues.
As he stood onstage during the recent Democratic debate in Nevada, he took "offense" to Wolf Blitzer's use of the term "illegal aliens."
"They are immigrants," Kucinich announced. "And we are a country of immigrants."
He was quick to remind the audience that he voted against NAFTA, against the war, against the Patriot Act. And he blasted John Edwards for voting for opening trade with China.
"I didn't," Kucinich said. "That's why I'm the worker's president."
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