Salon has an interesting piece posted about Dennis Kucinich, and I hate how much I find myself in agreement with it. It's an article that takes on a little bit of a snarky tone that brings up some questions about why we support the candidates we do.
From the article:
You are lying to yourselves. In a quest for an "electable," "not insane" presidential candidate, you are willfully overlooking the candidate who actually comes closest to representing the things in which you really believe: justice and peace and the basic freedoms that should be afforded to every American, regardless of race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation or galactic origin. In an effort to distance yourself from the squish of the Birkenstock and the stench of the patchouli, you have convinced yourself that compromise and pragmatism light the path to the White House. And you are correct. But still, before walking listlessly down the aisle toward our impending union with tepid centrism, let's rip our clothes off for one final, ill-advised fling with ideological honesty:
Dennis Kucinich is our man! If he can't do it, well, that's because we're all chickenshit and condemned to a future of our own making. Yay, Dennis!
I think she's on to something. I think most of us here support a single payer health care system, marriage rights for all Americans, impeachment, and a repeal of the Patriot Act.
Kucinich supports those things, but in the D Kos straw polls, Dennis doesn't do too well. Last month, he came in at six percent.
The writer continues:
It's true, and I suspect many of you think it to yourselves, perhaps even confess it sotto voce to your loved ones during each Democratic debate (especially the ones where he doesn't mention the UFO): If the Democratic base pulled levers for the candidate whose policies best reflected its own beliefs, Dennis Kucinich should win his party's nomination in a landslide.
But alas, as Democratic voters, we've been taught to vote with our heads and not our hearts. We are obsessed with the ability of a candidate to get elected to the point that a guy who best represents many of our basic beliefs is ignored by most of us.
Of course, there are other reasons we choose our candidates besides agreement on issues. In the end, much of it comes down to a gut feeling about whom we trust. I'm an Obama guy and I think I am mostly because I feel like I can trust him to do what's right and to tell the truth. Others probably have similar reasons as to why they support other candidates.
But you would think that a guy who best speaks to the issues that are more important to the Democratic base would have more than a tiny following.
More from the article:
There is no better illustration of exactly how far right political discourse has swung, and how self-loathing and beaten down the Democratic Party has become, than that among its presidential candidates, the one most willing to consistently, unapologetically stand for the things on which the party is supposedly built (some of your more basic civil liberties) is also the guy who believes in aliens.
The writer ends the piece encouraging us to visit sites like this one to take quizes to learn which candidate represents your views.
I took it, and as has happened in other candidate matching services, Kucinich came up as the candidate who best represents my views. They said my second choice was Gravel, and I was relieved that they said the third best candidate for me was Obama.
So, yeah, I agree with the premise of the author. Kucinich does speak best to my political values, but for a variety of other reasons, I'm supporting someone else. I think that's sad, but I wonder to what extent that feeling is caused by my desire to elect a Democrat and what part of that has to do with my perceived inadequacies of Dennis