2003 Oct 22
\nby Katy Butler<\/p>\n
Liberals in Marin are torn between pragmatic Dean or idealistic Kucinich.<\/em><\/p>\n IT WAS AN UNLIKELY meeting between the American industrial heartland and coastal California. On a sunny Saturday morning in September, Congressman and presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich\u2014repeatedly elected by conservative, working class Reagan Democrats from his home base of Cleveland, Ohio\u2014stood in front of a microphone at the Fort Mason conference center while Bay Area feminists, writers and environmentalists enjoyed a vegan brunch of tofu scramble drenched in shiitake mushroom gravy.<\/p>\n At one table, Mill Valley authors Jean Shinoda Bolen (Goddesses in Everywoman and Crones Don\u2019t Whine) and Shakai Gawain (Creative Visualization) chatted with New Age thinker Marianne Williamson and Matthew Fox, the Oakland theologian. Outside the windows stood the Golden Gate Bridge, while closer by, the white masts of sailboats bobbed against blue water.<\/p>\n Kucinich, a slightly built man who looked like a leprechaun in a good suit, went over the highlights of his far-ranging presidential platform: national, Canadian style healthcare; cuts in Pentagon spending; full Social Security benefits at 65 and free college education; a Department of Peace; immediate withdrawal from Iran and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); and federal recognition of gay marriage. Then he took questions from the floor about what he called \u201cspiritual politics\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI can understand how some candidates go out on the campaign trail angry,\u201d he said, apparently referring to Howard Dean\u2014who, like Kucinich, opposed the Iraq invasion long before Congressman Dick Gephardt stood on the Rose Garden watching President Bush sign the congressional resolution authorizing it. \u201cBut I\u2019ve seen political movements fueled by anger and they can\u2019t sustain themselves. I don\u2019t think anger has transformative power. It doesn\u2019t get to here,\u201d he said, and touched his heart.<\/p>\n There was a moment of quiet. The message resonated with supporters at the brunch\u2014as it does throughout much of Marin County. Here, Kucinich and Dean are the only presidential candidates so far to attract solid cores of active volunteers. Cars on 101 flash by sporting Dean and Kucinich bumper stickers. When anti-Bush authors like Molly Ivins or Paul Krugman read at Book Passage, volunteers from each campaign stand in the parking lot and hand out competing leaflets.<\/p>\n About 65 local Kucinich volunteers\u2014some never before involved in electoral politics\u2014meet regularly at the statewide headquarters in Corte Madera to support the gentle, politically radical vegan who chairs the House Progressive Caucus. At the same time, at least 150 locals are working out of living rooms and kitchens in San Rafael, San Anselmo and Mill Valley for Dean\u2014the beefy, more politically moderate brawler who, while governor of Vermont, signed a bill legitimating long-term gay partnerships and extended healthcare to virtually all the state\u2019s children.<\/p>\n \u201cMany people tell me they are torn between the two,\u201d said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-6th District) who endorsed Kucinich in May. \u201cDennis has huge popularity in the county. And I like Dean, and so does my district\u201d.<\/p>\n The competition between the two men\u2014emblematic of an enduring split between pragmatism and idealism in liberal America\u2014runs through Marin politics and friendships and even my own home. It raises questions about why people vote at all: is it to express themselves authentically? To influence events? Or to handicap the odds and back a winning horse?<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n TO WOOSLEY, WHAT matters is moving the Democratic party leftward. \u201cWe should vote for Kucinich, someone I thought could beat Bush, Dean is head and shoulders above the rest\u2014 he has the best ability to speak in the sound bites used in the modern media.\u201d<\/p>\n A similar division rusn right through my house: I am an active Dean contributor and volunteer, and in September, I nailed a blue cardboard Dean sign to our garage door. My partner Brian\u2014who voted for Nader in 2000 along with 6.7 percent of Marin\u2019s voters \u2014 has posted a Kucinich sign next to mine on the garage door.<\/p>\n \u201cI love Denis\u2019s values,\u201d Brian told me. \u201cCommunity, caring, looking out for the other guy. He\u2019s aware that the gap between rich and poor is way too big and that special interests are dominating. He\u2019s articulated cutting the bloated military\u2014industrial complex\u2014 we don\u2019t need this when 46 million people are living in poverty and 26 million children have no health insurance in the richest country in the world\u201d.<\/p>\n I nodded. Then I thought back to a raucous $100-per-person fund-raiser I\u2019d attended with 1,000 other Dean supporters in early September at the home of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren in San Jose. Silicon Valley techies and local politicians filled the lawn, most wearing suits or crisp khakis and shirts appropriate for Casual Friday.<\/p>\n Stumping in white shirtsleeves, Dean roared into a microphone from a terraced balcony, talking about healthcare and renewable energy and a favorite social program that dramatically lowered child abuse rates in Vermont. Then he hammered on his favorite subject: George W. Bush. \u201cThere are more al Qaeda in Iraq now shooting at Americans and bombing Iraqis than there were before we started out, Mr. President!\u201d he bellowed. \u201cHow do you explain that!\u201d He looked as if he were about to pop the collar-buttons off his shirt. He reminded me of a short, well-muscled kid who isn\u2019t afraid to get in the face of the class bully. He raised between $150,000 and $200,000 that day, at least 10 times what Fort Mason netted Kucinich. This, I thought, is what it takes to win.<\/p>\n Brian nodded. Then he said, \u201cBut I love Kucinich\u201d.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n THE DIVERGENT PROGRESS of the two candidates\u2014one now considered among the frontrunners, the other still fighting to break out\u2014illuminates divergent political strategies by men who both had the guts to oppose the war when it was supposedly political suicide. Both started nowhere in the national polls. Before last spring, Kucinich was known only to a handful of Marinites who had been recipients of his emailed peaceable \u201cprayer for America\u201d a few months after 9\/11. Dean was known only to those who had received a national fund-raising letter signed by Independent Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords.<\/p>\n Then last March, a week before U.S. troops landed in Iraq, both men appeared at the statewide Democratic party convention in Sacramento. Senator John Edwards was booed for his support of the Iraq war. Kucinich sang snippets from \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner\u201d and presented his vision. And then there was Dean.<\/p>\n As Congresswoman Lofgren remembers it, Dean came at the end of a long series of very boring speeches. He wasn\u2019t using the teleprompter, and he had no written speech. \u201cWhat I want to know\u201d, Dean began, \u201cis what in the world so many Democrats are doing voting for the president\u2019s unilateral invasion of Iraq?\u201d and went on from there.<\/p>\n \u201cI was there in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy announced, and this was the best political speech of my lifetime\u201d, said Lofgren, who endorsed Dean the next day. \u201cI twas a vision of what we can do better and how we\u2019re capable of doing better. Delegates were crying. I found my 17-year-old son in the crowd and he\u2019s a great kid but not a political activist, and he was coked up. Outside the hall, there were tables of campaign literature and people stripped Dean\u2019s table bare\u201d.<\/p>\n Lynn Bornstein and Mayme Hubert of Marin\u2019s Democratic Central Committee (DCC-M) came back fromt eh convention determined to start a grass-roots Dean group. \u201cKucinich gave a good speech but I didn\u2019t think he had the right bearing\u201d, said Hubert, of of eight DCC-M members now supporting Dean. \u201cSure, Dean is not as liberal. But this election is not about that. This election is about beating Bush\u201d.<\/p>\n Bob Wrubel, a retired Nature Company executive on the DCC-M, however, chose Kucinich. \u201cMayme and Lynn came back wowed by Dean, but I listened and there was something I didn\u2019t care for\u201d, he said. \u201cThis fellow is fairly conservative on most positions except the war. For me it\u2019s more important to be against the system that produced the war. Dennis sees that sort of thing and wants to take it on\u201d. (As of mid-October, in an indication of how fluid the field remains, Wrubel has turned his support to General Wesley Clark.)<\/p>\n Early in May, a few days after President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a borrowed flight suit and declared \u201cmajor combat operations\u201d over, Kucinich filled the 2,000-seat Marin Civic Center Auditorium with people willing to pay $20 each to hear him. Local philanthropist and spiritual leader Gina Thompson held a breakfast for him, attended by actor Peter Coyote, writer Jean Shinoda Bolen, Ram Dass and Spirit Rock Buddhist teachers Jack Kornfield and Sylvia Bornstein, who endorsed him.<\/p>\n At about the same time, Hubert and Bornstein used an Internet site called Meetup.com to organize a Dean \u201cmeet up\u201d – a web-catalyzed face-to-face meeting of the like-minded strangers\u2014outside Borders Bookstore. About 50 people showed up, starting a local movement that by October had expanded to include 400 people on an email list. Also in May, Dean drew 300 to a rally at the Larkspur ferry terminal and raised $86,000 at a fundraiser in Mill Valley. <\/p>\n The same month, Kucinich hired Dotty LeMieux (a Marin attorney who calls herself a progressive, environmentalist \u201cGreen Dog Democrat\u201d) as his statewide coordinator. He spoke at a packed Berkeley church, barnstormed the country and opened offices in 27 states.<\/p>\n Kucinich articulated an uncompromising progressive message. Dean told his followers they had the power \u201cto take this party back and this country back\u201d. Over the summer, Dean\u2019s campaign took off, thanks in part to a sophisticated national Web site that generated the formation of thousands of grass-roots groups across the country.<\/p>\n In mid-October, his campaign announced it had raised $14.8 million in the prior three months, more than any other Democratic candidate in history\u2014including Clinton when he was a sitting president. More significantly, the money had come from 223,000 people\u2014most of them small donors, and half contributing via the Internet. (The average donation was $73).<\/p>\n Kucinich, on the other hand, had not yet broken out of the bottom tier of candidates in the polls and had raised only $$3.6 million\u2014not enough to compete in what cynics call \u201cthe money primary\u201d – the gauge many mainstream news editors and journalists use to determine which candidates are \u201cviable\u201d enough to cover.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n OUTSIDE MARIN COUNTY, the differences between the two men look miniscule. Both have skeletons in their political closets: before last February, when he became pro-choice, Kucinich voted repeatedly against abortion rights. Dean supports the death penalty in some instances, and relieved a high approval rating as governor from the National Rifle Association.<\/p>\n Dean wants to roll back all the Bush tax cuts and balance the budget, while Kucinich concentrates on rolling back tax cuts for the rich and supports legalizing medical marijuana. \u201cWhen all the facts come out and people are paying attention\u201d, says Kucinich\u2019s California coordinator LeMieux, \u201cit\u2019ll become very obvious that Kucinich is much more progressive than Dean\u201d.<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t cut much ice with Congresswoman Lofgren. \u201cI like Dennis\u201d, she said. \u201cPeople have a right to think Dennis is closer to their viewpoint, but he\u2019s not going to win\u201d, she says. \u201cThat\u2019s just the fact\u201d.<\/p>\n The differences between the two politicians arise in part form the landscapes that produced them. Dean, 54, grew beyond a patrician Manhattan upbringing to become a doctor and part time politician living in a middle class split level in Vermont. His ancestors were Sag Harbor, Long Island whaling captains, watch case manufacturers, sugar brokers and wealthy stockbrokers. Kucinich, 56, on the other hand, is one of seven children of a Cleveland, Ohio Teamsters Union truck driver. He lived in 21 different places with his family, including two cars, before leaving home at 17.<\/p>\n In 1969, while Dean was drifting though Yale (where he asked for African American roommates), Kucinich, at 23, was elected to the Cleveland City Council. In those days, Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Great Society was just about o be torn apart by the Vietnam war, but Kucinich\u2019s childhood friends could still count on good lifetime jobs in local steel mills and machine shops. By 1977, when Kucinich became mayor of a declining Cleveland, the deindustrialization of the nation\u2019s \u201crust belt\u2019 was under way and manufacturers were moving jobs to Korea, Brazil and Mexico in search of cheap nonunion labor.<\/p>\n \u201cI always ran community-based campaigns, based on peoples\u2019 concerns at the neighborhood level\u201d, Kucinich told me. \u201cSo my political instincts arise from neighborhoods of primarily poor people, and people who are working class\u201d. As mayor, he refused to sell off the city\u2019s municipal power plant even though local banks then plunged Cleveland into economic default.<\/p>\n \u201cI did it because I understood that what people pay for the utility bill mattered\u201d, Kucinich told me in a phone call in early October. \u201cI remember my parents counting the pennies to pay that bill. I carry that experience in my heart and that connects me with a lot of people\u201d.<\/p>\n He was voted out of office and spent the next 15 years \u201cscrambling\u201d outside politics. Then in 1994, the Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted public officials conceding he\u2019d been right about the power plant and had saved consumers millions. A utility building was named after him, and he was elected to the state senate and then the U.S. House of Representatives.<\/p>\n Dean\u2019s pragmatism, on the other hand, was forged in Vermont, where he became a state senator and then lieutenant governor in the 1980\u2019s. He became governor in 1991 when Richard Snelling, his Republican predecessor, died in office of a heart attack. Dean soon found himself juggling Vermont\u2019s diverse constituencies: descendants of traditionally Democratic ethnic mill workers in Burlington; independent, Republican dairy farmers and hunters; and former hippies\u2013 prototypical Nader and Kucinich voters who had fled from big cities to start organic yogurt companies, potteries and businesses like Ben and Jerry\u2019s ice cream.<\/p>\n Dean threaded his way through hodgepodge as a political hybrid, supporting health programs, environmental conservation and abortion rights\u2014and gun owner rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget. When he took office in 1991, Reagan was president and Vermont was in a recession. His Republican predecessor had raised taxes. Dean cut spending, reduced welfare benefits, paid down the stat\u2019s deficit and created a \u201crainy day fund\u201d against future downturns.<\/p>\n For the next 12 years, Dean battled with progressives from his own party. \u201che made us very disciplined about spending, even if we didn\u2019t really like it\u201d, former state Senate Majority Leader Dick McCormack told the Washington Post in August. \u201cI was a liberal Democrat and I fought him a lot, but he made the Democrats very hard to beat\u201d. (Dean left the state3 in good financial shape: Vermont now has $10.4 million surplus).<\/p>\n Perhaps Dean\u2019s defining political moment came early on, after the failure of his three-year effort to pass a universal single-payer healthcare plan (a Canadian style plan like the one Kucinich now backs). Attacked by insurance company lobbyists, the plan collapsed in 1994 legislative session, and Dean became a fanatic devotee of the successful baby steps rather than the noble, failing leap.<\/p>\n Over the next decade, he gradually expanded existing Vermont health programs until they covered practically every child in the state and many of the working poor. A state prescription drug benefit now covers everyone with an income up to 400 percent of the poverty level and 91 percent of residents have health insurance. Vermont was recently named \u201chealthiest state in the nation \u201c for the third consecutive year.<\/p>\n When I asked Dean at a press conference in San Francisco in September why he was such a pragmatist, he remembered Vermont. \u201c I was a governor for 12 years, and I desperately want to get things done\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cPurists think we should have a single-payer health system. Maybe we should but we can\u2019t get it passed. Here\u2019s what happens when you try to totally refor the healthcare system. The Democrats fight with each other about how to do it. The special interests and the Republicans come in and kill the bill, and the losers are the 41 million people with no health insurance and the people who can hardly afford what they’re buying.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very pragmatic\u201d, he continued. \u201cI want a healthcare system that will cover everybody. After we get everybody in the system , we can have a big fight about how to change the system. But let\u2019s not set 41 million people loose without health insurance for another 10 years\u201d.<\/p>\n That logic doesn\u2019t move Rene Rushin, the Northern California coordinator for Kucinich volunteers. Dean, she says, burrowing an image from Al Sharpton, is \u201ca Republican in a donkey suit\u201d. Like Kucinich himself, she can\u2019t understand people who agree with Kucinich’s platform for wholesale reform but work for Dean. As Kucinich put it to me the day of the Fort Mason brunch, \u201cI would be electable, if everyone who wanted to vote for me just did\u201d.<\/p>\n Kim Potochnik, the Dean volunteer, thinks that reasoning sells him short. \u201cI\u2019m not giving up on my ideas\u201d, he said. \u201cI hope some day to see a nation with very strict gun laws. But in the meantime, how do I find common ground with the Montana hunter who I agree with on a lot of other issues? He\u2019s struggling with healthcare, he\u2019s struggling with a job. Should I not talk to him?\u201d<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n IT IS EARLY yet in the political season. Almost half the nation\u2019s voters still can\u2019t name a single Democratic presidential candidate. A fluid situation became even more fluid when General Wesley Clark entered the race in mid-September and dislodged Dean from front-runner status. Many voters watch and wait. Yet Dean and Kucinich have already altered the landscape. It\u2019s no longer political suicide to criticize the president. And no Democratic presidential l candidate is still running as \u201cBush Lite\u201d.<\/p>\n Last month, I asked Dean what he\u2019d say to somebody who wanted to vote for Kucinich for the purity of his progressive positions. \u201cSome people vote for just that reason and they should vote for Dennis\u201d, he said. \u201cI also think we will be able to take back a lot of the third party voters if I\u2019m the nominee, because people desperately understand that there\u2019s an enormous difference between George Bush and the Democrats and the country\u2019s suffering terribly because of it.<\/p>\n The differences between the two don\u2019t concern actor Peter Coyote, a Green party member who actively backs both men. \u201cKucinich is probably more progressive on a spectrum of issues, which is why I\u2019m supporting him\u201d, says Coyote. \u201cBut my suspicion is that the might be a little strange and far-out for America. This is not a left-wing country. Dean is a straight shooter and a very practical Yankee. He has run a state and balanced the budget. He\u2019s getting tarred and feathered for not being a liberal but he\u2019s never presented himself as a liberal.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of them is going to lose and, and closer to the election, one should defer to the other. Maybe Dean is not left enough. But do you want to cast symbolic voters for a guy you agree with every step of the way that is not going to win? That will not help anything except make you feel pure\u201d.<\/p>\n \u00a92003 Katy Butler. All Rights Reserved. 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