<< Front page Commentary February 20, 2004

Kucinich speech offered little

To the Editors:

Congressman Dennis Kucinich would make a wonderful president of the United States—— perhaps the best in the history of the USA. He would push for a criminal justice system based on justice, schools that value education, a healthier environment, health care for everyone, equality for queer people and a foreign policy that was aimed towards peace.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kucinich will not be elected in 2004. Mr. Kucinich has won more than ten percent of the vote in only one of the roughly twenty democratic primaries so far. Maybe 2008 will be his (and our) year.

Maybe the influence of his candidacy will push the rest of the field (this year and in 2008) further to the left. His candidacy has the ability to do more than that, but sadly it appears that it won’t.

Mr. Kucinich had everything to gain from his visit to Oberlin and nothing to offer. He did not woo us by making profound new analyses that opened our eyes in new ways.

For the most part, Mr. Kucinich presented (in a very charismatic way) a number of ideas that we already knew about. Perhaps we didn’t know that there was a presidential candidate who advocated these ideas, and that is where Kucinich had something to gain.

He gained potential supporters. What did we get from hearing Mr. Kucinich speak? Very little. What could we have gotten from Mr. Kucinich? While we anxiously await the day when Mr. Kucinich becomes our president, he can use his high profile (i.e. power) to help create changes in small, localized settings.

The town of Oberlin and the College are far cries from the national campaign that Mr. Kucinich is running. However, there are very real and serious things that people in Oberlin are working to change and while Mr. Kucinich is working to push the Democrats to the left, he can at the same time support local activism in a public way. Kucinich can use his public persona to pressure power-wielding institutions or individuals in the various localities he visits, thereby supporting as he seeks support.

Mr. Kucinich was presented with a golden opportunity to put this into action. In response to the question about transparency, all Mr. Kucinich had to do was say, “Yes, I will endorse the effort to make the books public” (or “No, I don’t support that”).

Instead, he skirted the question by pretending to not understand the issue. (What is there to not understand about the college revealing the corporations it is invested in?)

There is no reason why Mr. Kucinich should wait until he is elected president to work for change.

—Lee Gargagliano

College sophomore


 
 
   

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