Ohio's Dennis Kucinich is expressing the anger of some Democrats at the administration's inability to tackle core issues, writes LARA MARLOWE
CONGRESSMAN DENNIS Kucinich, from Ohio’s 10th district, is a rare animal in US politics: a true left-winger.
The son of a Croatian immigrant lorry driver and an Irish-American mother, Kucinich is likely to be re-elected for an eighth term in his working class west Cleveland district. He opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and made unsuccessful attempts for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008.
A New York Times/CBS News poll at the weekend shows that 33 per cent of American liberals are disappointed with President Barack Obama. Their absence from the polls today is one reason for the Democrats’ likely defeat. Kucinich is a spokesman for their point of view.
“Voters are now caught in a dilemma,” Kucinich says. “Do they sit it out as a way to object to the limited response of the party, and as a result facilitate handing over the keys of government to another party which paradoxically helped to create the mess? Or do we come back and urge people to give our party still another chance to undo the great damage that was done by George W Bush and company?”
Though he also blames Congress, and does not explicitly name President Barack Obama, Kucinich’s condemnation is clear. “The American people expected more, and they had a right to expect more,” he says.
The Democratic party should have stopped the goverment “being used as the accelerator” to make the rich even richer.
“Whenever our party acts, it appears to be not mindful of the depth of the calamity that’s been visited upon the American people,” says Kucinich.
“There are 15 million people out of work . . . More than six million have lost their homes and another six million may lose their houses. Banks took the money the government gave them and used it to strengthen their financial position instead of helping to keep people in their houses.”
Kucinich fought a losing battle in Congress to defund the wars, which have not figured in the midterm campaign. “The war in Iraq was based on lies, but we’re still there,” he says. “Afghanistan is a carnival of corruption which the US taxpayers are paying for . . . when you see how many innocent civilians have been killed . . . how the American people have repeatedly been lied to about the conduct of the war, you have to ask: who’s minding the store here?”
American leaders “have been shoring fragments against the ruins, and we had to do more than that; we had to rebuild America,” Kucinich says, paraphrasing TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Continuing in a literary vein, he takes a line out of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: “We are now in a place where hope is attempting to create from its own wreck the thing it is contemplating.”
The absence of dramatic action by the Obama administration “has given way to the most inane assertions on the part of Republicans – for example that the government should not invest in the economy for public purposes,” Kucinich says.
The right attack government spending and the stimulus programme. “Are we waiting for the Bank of America to build a bridge?” Kucinich asks rhetorically. “Because their bridge goes to their next offshore enterprise.”
Asking corporations to create jobs is “a risky enterprise, when you consider that their desire to maximise profits at the expense of the American people . . . at the centre of our economic dilemma.”
Kucinich wants a moratorium on home foreclosures, a massive public works programme, and an immediate exit from Afghanistan and Iraq. “The grand celebration that was the 2008 election came with a set of instructions to change things,” he says.
“The fact that our party hasn’t explored it has created a deep frustration . . . we really need to be attuned to the practical aspirations of the American people. We have fallen far short in doing that . . . That is why we are struggling in this election.”