comment | posted February 19, 2008 (web only)
Give Dennis Kucinich His Due Steve Cobble
Five years ago, this month, the world said no to the Iraq War, with massive demonstrations all around the world involving 10 million people. In the United States, more than 100,000 people came to New York City to challenge the Bush/Cheney rush to war--and one of the speakers, one of the very few elected officials to speak that day, was Dennis Kucinich.
So what, you say? Well, maybe it's time to give Dennis his due.
Compare the outpouring of affection and respect for John Edwards with the snark and abuse offered Kucinich when they each bowed out of the presidential race last month. Most liberal columnists and progressive bloggers offered kudos to Edwards for forcing and/or encouraging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to move left on healthcare, on trade issues, on poverty and inequality. John and Elizabeth Edwards did exactly that, and I offer my own thanks for the issues they ran on, especially given everything that was going on in their family. They deserve our appreciation for boldly putting good issue positions on the table, fighting hard for them and opening the door for the other candidates to get bolder, too.
But why stop there? Why not ask who opened the door for Edwards? Because on almost every issue that John Edwards battled hard on in 2007, helping move Obama and Clinton closer to the light, it's indisputable that Dennis Kucinich pushed on those same issues back in 2003, again in 2007 and every year in between. In other words, Kucinich was against the war, for fair trade, against NAFTA and the WTO, against the Patriot Act, for single-payer health care, for an infrastructure plan to rebuild America and put forward a plan to bring the troops home--all long before not just John Edwards, but long before almost anybody.
Consider the Patriot Act vote, cast by the Congress in October of 2001, only a few weeks after 9/11, in a scary time of threats and intimidation from the Bush/Cheney Administration. This vote had our lawmakers so scared that only a few brave House members stood up to oppose it, and in the Senate, only Russ Feingold had the guts to say no. But Kucinich voted no. Why? Because he read the bill. He risked his political career to oppose an intrusive, liberty-violating, fundamentally un-American bill. Very few others did, especially House members from ethnic urban districts. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/cobble 
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