Dennis Kucinich
The oldest of seven children, Dennis was born in 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio to Frank and Virginia Kucinich. The family lived in 21 places, including a couple of cars, by the time he was 17 years-old. One of his most vivid memories was watching his family count out money on an old white counter top to see if they had enough for their bills. He attended Catholic grade and high schools.
One nun, noticing that other students were commenting on the fact that he seemed only to wear one purple pair of pants, obtained another pair for him. Such acts of kindness and compassion seared themselves into his memory and led him to a life of public service.
At 17 he left home, took jobs as an orderly and also as a copy editor while enrolling full-time at Case Western University. After graduation he began his political career serving as a councilman and later as Clerk of Courts. At 31, he ran for mayor of Cleveland attempting to become the youngest mayor of a major American city in history.
He was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1977 on the promise to save the city’s municipally-owned electric system which offered customers significantly lower rates than the private utility. A year later, Cleveland’s banks demanded that he sell the city’s 70 year-old municipally-owned electric system to its private competitor (in which the banks had a financial interest) as a precondition of extending credit to the city.
The attempted political blackmail failed as did several assassination attempts. He remembered his parents counting out coins on the dresser and refused to sell the people’s power. In an incident unprecedented in modern American politics, the Cleveland banks plunged the city into default for a mere $15 million despite being offered triple collateral to protect the loan.
The principled stand destroyed his political career. He lost his reelection bid. He was demonized as the mayor who threw Cleveland into default. Fifteen years later, the citizens of Cleveland - recognizing he had saved them hundreds of millions of dollars in municipal power bills and also forced the private utility to keep bills low to compete – voted him into the Ohio Senate. His campaign signs featured a light bulb and the expression “Because he was right.” In 1998 the Cleveland City Council honored Dennis for “having the courage and foresight to refuse to sell the city’s municipal electric system.”
In 1996, Dennis unseated a two-term Republican incumbent. He has followed that narrow victory by winning 60 to 70% of the votes in the following elections. Much of those vote totals were achieved because of outstanding constituent services and his successful efforts to save a local steel mill, two neighborhood hospitals and 10th District cities a dramatic - and disruptive - increase in train traffic.
At the same time his reputation as a progressive leader in the Congress grew. He was voted the chair of the Progressive Caucus because of his passionate commitment to peace, human rights, workers rights, economic justice and the environment.
In 2002 the second great challenge of his elected career occurred. After analyzing the “evidence” presented by the Administration in its rush to folly in Iraq and actually reading the National Intelligence Estimate, he stepped forward to help lead 125 Democrats in voting against the blank check for the President to wage an illegal, immoral and ineffective war.
Speaking from the floor of the House some 140 times against the war and appearing on over 100 radio and talk shows was a risky political move. But it did not stop him. The neo-cons and their complicit friends in media engaged in a frenzy of caustic name calling. In Feb. of 2003 when Dennis explained on “Meet the Press” that oil was a key causal factor for the war and that our troops would be trapped in a costly door-to-door war, administration zealot Richard Perle insisted Dennis’ comments were “scurrilous” and “an out-and-out lie.” Richard Cohen of the Washington Post chimed in to agree with Perle calling a Congressman who saw no evidence of WMDs and did see oil as a cause for war a “fool.” Other “mainstream” opinion commentators called him a “clown” and worse for not seeing the clear evidence of WMDs.
For his tireless and courageous efforts he was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2003.
In 2006 when Israel and Hezbollah were facing off, Dennis again stepped forward for peace. As the Administration gave a green light to Israel and the Democratic Congress sat silent – again – Dennis warned that the conflict and the ensuring deaths would make peace even more intractable. And now as the Israeli and Lebanese governments teeter from public criticism, his words ring true.
It was not the first nor, hopefully, will it be the last time Dennis Kucinich ignored political dangers to do the right thing. After all, it is his life story.
In 1969, Dennis Kucinich won the Ward 7 Cleveland City Council election, defeating nine-term Councilman John Bilinski by 16 votes in a recount. He was 23 years old and still a fulltime student at Cleveland State University. In city council he helped author the city's first air pollution code and was instrumental in the creation of a city department of consumer affairs.
In 1972, at age 25 and still a student, Dennis won a hotly contested Democratic congressional primary and came within one percent of defeating the incumbent Republican in the General Election, despite being outspent 20-1.
In 1975, Dennis was elected Clerk of Courts and in a twisted quirk of fate by virtue of the Clerk's position, his name appeared on every eviction notice sent from the City to people in Cleveland.
In 1977, at the age of 31, over the opposition of both political parties, Dennis was elected Mayor of the City of Cleveland, fulfilling the intuition he had had fifteen years earlier. He was the youngest person ever to have been elected Mayor of a major American city. Dennis won with the help of the Cleveland's African-American community with whom his administration shared power, appointments and city contracts equally.
Dennis' first act in office was to cancel the sale of Muny Light, Cleveland's publicly owned municipal electric system, which had been sold to its competitor, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, prior to Dennis coming to office.
In 1978, Dennis battled throughout the year with banks, organized crime, both political parties and the corporate media to fulfill his commitment to the people of Cleveland to save Muny Light.
On December 15, 1978 the banks, having rejected every other form of payment, demanded the sale of Muny Light to a private utility company in which the banks had financial interests. The sale of Muny Light became the banks' precondition for extending the city's credit on loans the previous mayor had taken out. As the chairman of the lead bank tried to coerce the young mayor to sell, Dennis' thoughts went back to the time he watched his parents counting their last pennies at the kitchen table to pay their utility bill. Knowing that electricity rates in Cleveland would increase substantially if the private utility gained a monopoly, Dennis said "no" to the sale. The financial establishment which had pressured the mayor to sell Muny Light would have profited directly from the sale given their many business ties to the private utility. Their plans having failed, the banks plunged the city into fabricated financial default. It was an event without precedent in American history. Despite several assassination attempts, Dennis had single handedly thwarted all efforts to force the sale of Muny Light, but at great risk to his political career.
In 1979, throttled by Dennis's rescue of Muny Light, the corporate media falsely blamed Dennis for the default and he was defeated for reelection, with corporate Cleveland raising an unprecedented million dollars to fund his opponent. His political obituary was written. Dennis spent the next fifteen years in the political wilderness, unable to win a major election.
In 1993, Muny Light underwent a massive expansion. Dennis was credited with having saved the people of the City of Cleveland hundreds of millions of dollars on their electric bills and was publicly acknowledged by the City of Cleveland for his courage in fighting the sale of Muny Light.
In 1994, popular demand for Dennis to return to public life resulted in him being elected to the Ohio Senate, defeating a Republican incumbent. His victory was based on public recognition of his courageous stand to save Cleveland's light system. Dennis was the only Democrat in Ohio to defeat a Republican incumbent at the State level in the 1994 elections.
In 1995, Dennis finally conquered his Crohn's disease when he took his health into his own hands, on the advice of his friend Yelena Boxer, and eliminated a diet of meat and dairy in favor of plant-based, vegan whole food. That together with Chinese herbal medicine allowed Dennis to achieve the full level of health as an adult that he never experienced as a child.
In 1996, Dennis was elected to the United States House of Representatives on his fifth try, defeating a Republican incumbent member of the House leadership.
In 2000, Dennis forced the reopening of two community hospitals that had already been closed. One of them was St. Alexis where he had worked decades earlier as a surgical technician. Throughout the decade of the 1990s, hundreds of other hospitals in inner-city communities across the nation were not as fortunate. St. Alexis remained open until 2003. The other hospital, Richmond Heights, remains open.
In 2001, while dozens of steel mills were being closed around the country, Dennis rescued Cleveland's steel industry with a court order blocking the shut down of the blast furnaces. A new buyer emerged and now the mill Dennis saved is a flagship of an international steel company providing over 1,700 jobs. Thus Dennis was responsible for keeping the same flame burning over the industrial flats that had once illuminated the interior of the car he lived in with his family forty years earlier.
On July 11, 2001, inspired by the strength, leadership and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Christ, Dennis authored and introduced legislation to create a Cabinet level Department of Peace and Nonviolence. Domestically the Department will create programs to deal with domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, racial violence, gang violence and the root causes of all violence in our society. The legislation is now backed by a national movement.
In 2002, Dennis wrote a thorough analysis of the President's flawed case for war and distributed it to all members of Congress. Despite being attacked and labeled by the media as unpatriotic and much worse, Dennis stood strong for what he knew was right and led 125 members of the House of Representatives in opposition to the illegal invasion of Iraq, warning that the forthcoming war was based on lies and that there was no proof that Iraq had anything to do with 911, with Al Qaeda's role in 911 and that there was no proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He also identified oil as a cause for the war and predicted if America went to war, it would soon be bogged down in house to house fighting.
On February 3, 2003 Dennis co-authored legislation HR 676 which he had previously proposed to the 2000 Democratic Platform Committee, to create a national health care system, Medicare for All. The legislation insures a universal standard of care and access that provides American people with the health care that every other industrialized democracy in the world makes available to its people. HR 676 has inspired a national movement which includes tens of thousands of physicians, hundreds of union locals and several state political parties.
In 2004, Dennis ran for President on a platform of peace, universal single payer not for profit health care and fair trade conditioned on workers rights, human rights and environmental quality principles, only possible through the cancelling of NAFTA and withdrawal from the WTO. For the second time he presented a plan to the Democratic platform committee for Medicare for all.
In 2005, on May 4th, British born Elizabeth Harper went to Washington, D.C. during her second week in America, to discuss monetary policy with legislators. There she had an eight minute meeting with Dennis in his office. Though neither had known of the other prior to their meeting, each instantly knew they had just met their life partner, though they had barely spoken to each other. They met by chance again three weeks later in New Mexico, declared their love and got engaged. Dennis and Elizabeth were married on August 21st, 2005.
In 2006, Muny Light observed its 100th birthday, with a celebration of Dennis' role in saving it. Dennis was reelected to his sixth term in Congress and was chosen by his colleagues to be the chair of the Government Oversight and Reform investigative subcommittee on Domestic Policy. He has investigative jurisdiction over every area of the federal government with the exception of defense and homeland security, giving his subcommittee the broadest reach of any on Capitol Hill. The first series of hearings he called focused predatory lending schemes which destroyed people's home ownership dreams.
On December 12, 2006, after seeing that congressional Democrats had no intention of ending the war in Iraq, Dennis stepped forward to lead with a campaign for the Presidency. His platform is based on a new national security doctrine of Strength through Peace which turns the dominant neoconservative doctrine of Peace through Strength on its head. Peace through Strength led America into an illegal war against Iraq, with the acquiescence of leaders of both political parties. The Kucinich doctrine of Strength through Peace rejects unilateralism, preemption and first strike in favor of direct engagement, diplomacy, and adherence to international law. Dennis has given over 150 speeches on the floor of the House challenging the war. His national security doctrine, his courage in opposing the war and his votes against funding the war position him uniquely in the campaign for the Presidency. Hailed as "the darling of the Democratic base", this product of an inner city childhood has become the conscience of the Democratic Party and is a world leader for peace.
By 2009, having established himself as a truth teller and the one national leader with the strength to stand for the deep meaning of the Constitution of the United States, Dennis hopes to have realized his goal of reaching the top in national politics and being elected President of the United States, a goal described in his 10th grade autobiographical essay.
Today, many of the homes that Dennis lived in are gone: 2519 Carnegie was taken for a freeway. The apartment building on E. 107th, St. Clair, the apartment at 10712 St. Clair, the house at 1377 East 30th St, the homes in the Hough-Crawford community, the Brackland Avenue apartment no longer exist. The sites of the W. 73rd home and the apartment building on West 61st are now vacant lots. The house on E. 72nd St. is gone as is the house on East 72nd Place. 8110 Finney no longer exists, it was taken for a utility right of way. Parmadale no longer functions as a children's receiving home, but it does provide care for troubled youth. Uncle Frank and Aunt Marion's home on Kirton Avenue, the house at 589 E 101st and Uncle Pete's house on East 33rd are still there, as is the apartment in St. Vitus' neighborhood.
St. John's College, where Dennis had speech therapy, no longer exists. St. Peter's School has been closed as have Holy Name Elementary, St. Colman's School and St. John Cantius High School. Dennis still celebrates every St. Patrick's Day at St Colman's church and takes clothes each year to the St Aloysius Church and School for distribution to neighborhood children, in memory of Sister Leona.