The King of Spin: Dennis Kucinich

Cleveland Scene: The King of Spin
How Dennis Kucinich remade himself from race-baiting bomb-thrower to liberal sweetheart.
By Denise Grollmus
Published: December 5, 2007


(The Cleveland Press Collection)

It was December 1978, the darkest period in Cleveland history.

Just a year earlier, 31-year-old Dennis Kucinich had been elected mayor. Now the city was in bankruptcy. Six hundred jobs had been slashed, including 400 policemen and firefighters. The neighborhood development corporations, once the backbone of Cleveland's renewal, had been drained of their funding. And City Hall had been overrun with an army of novitiates, whose qualifications began and ended with their loyalty to the mayor.

The man charged with averting disaster was the city's 24-year-old finance director, whose only work experience was a nine-month stint at Merrill Lynch. The acting police chief was a 21-year-old college coed with wispy bangs. The inevitable implosion of Kucinich's scorched-earth rise to mayor had arrived.

As a city councilman, he had climbed the ranks of Cleveland politics through a strategy of nonstop combat, fighting everyone from colleagues to businessmen, bankers to bureaucrats. He accused them of being corrupt, lazy, and unsympathetic to the city's white working class — his largest sect of voters. If council was for tax abatements, Kucinich accused them of being in the pocket of business. If they wanted housing for the East Side's black poor, he castigated them for ignoring the West Side's ethnic whites. If you weren't with him, you were his enemy, and Kucinich spared no sound bites in illuminating your sins....

Kucinich may have been right about corruption and lethargy, but he was now proving to be a much worse alternative. After all, a mayor's job is a yeoman's task, about paving streets and ensuring safety. But Kucinich had allowed style to manhandle substance; he was against everything, rather than providing solutions of his own. "If you are mayor, you have to do things," says Mike Roberts, The Plain Dealer's former city editor. "There was nothing that he did of any success, unless it was self-serving."...

Yet almost 30 years later, Kucinich has managed to recast this period as his greatest triumph. In the revised telling, this isn't a story of a mayor who hurled the city into chaos with startling swiftness. It's a rewritten David and Goliath tale, with Kucinich playing the role as the only man with the cojones to stand up to corruption and nefarious corporations. His presidential campaign paints a man of sturdy principles, unsinkable optimism, and untainted liberal bona fides — a mythology now being regurgitated by everyone from supporters to the national media....

http://clevescene.com/2007-12-05/news/the-king-of-spin/full

We really need to keep him in Congress, there are very few Dems there these days you can go to who get things done.

to you and your candidate as he's just such a close 4th place. You 2 are hypocrites and if he's so good for congress he'll be great for the presidency. Bomb throwing? You can do better than that because you bombed.

because I think it's valuable for all to know what's out there in the press. I frankly have never seen a negative piece about Kucinich until this one. In fact, the last article I posted about him was a lovely story from the Washington Post about his marriage, with some beautiful photos of him and Elizabeth.

Everything they write about him is like the article you posted.

Don't worry, they have yet to start on Edwards. But they will. Edwards will be their next target. Like their UFO story. At least the Plain Dealer had the honesty to recently print what really happened. You'd think Kucinich had been talking to Aliens. Printed in the WSJ one week after Murdock took over. The witness who saw the mysterious lights along with Kucinich confirmed it was just a casual comment. It can be googled at the Plain Dealer. Whatever one reads , take it with a grain of salt. Want to see how professional DK , watch his questioning before his subcommittee under Rep. Waxman. The Domestic Policy subcommittee. Kucinich's questioning Blackwater representatives was nothing less than brilliant.

he took a mean dump in the woods behind someone's house.

:eyes:

Seems as though they had to go back over 30 years...using tainted sources,like the PR shill from the very company (CEI) Kucinich was at odds with over the Muny Light fiasco.



The whole thing is obviously a hit piece. As I said...waiting for the same crap to be posted about the other three candidates.