Word: kucinich
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cleveland and Philadelphia, a kind of politics of civility triumphed; both cities elected men who presented themselves as healers to succeed loudly abrasive mayors. Cleveland's self-styled populist, Dennis Kucinich, elected in 1977 at the age of 31, won nationwide notoriety for his abusive assaults on the city council, Cleve land's big corporations and banks - and even more for the fact that Cleveland last year became the first major U.S. city since the 1930s to default on debt repayments. Cold-shouldered by the Cleveland Democratic organization and almost beaten in a recall election last year, Kucinich...
Sometimes Kucinich can sound like a stereotyped left-intellectual: in his Playboy interview he drops allusions to 1984, Ghandi, Prometheus Unbound, Salvador Dali and Woody Allen. But Kucinich grew up in a large Catholic family in the inner city. His father is a truck driver who quit school after the ninth grade. As mayor, Kucinich forced business leaders to meet with him at Tony's Diner. He hopes to unite blacks and white ethnics under his banner of "urban populism." It is this vision of "the coalition of the future" that makes Kucinich unique...
...nation has seen attempts by some politicians, such as Michael Dukakis or Jerry Brown, to pioneer a new politics by combining liberal positions on moral or social issues with fiscal conservatism. Kucinich does the reverse. Believing "economic democracy is a precondition to political democracy," he emphasizes declining public services, unjust taxes, corporate power and other economic issues while soft-pedaling social concerns unpopular with his white ethnic constituents. Kucinich claims public housing is unwelcome in both black and white neighborhoods, and he says busing leads to white flight and resegregation...
Opponents have accused Kucinich of using racist appeals in his campaigns. In the nonpartisan mayoral primary, Kucinich polled only 15.3 per cent of the black vote compared to 25.3 per cent for Republican Lieutenant Governor George V. Voinovich. Still, Kucinich delivers speeches in the black ghetto to tumultuous applause and former mayor Carl Stokes has strongly endorsed him, telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "I understand that in a diverse city in which racial politics has been the order of the day, that, if a man is going to survive, he has to do what everyone who has survived has done...
...votes; in February he convinced two-thirds of Cleveland voters to raise their own income taxes and defeat a referendum to sell Muny Light; he finally won the approval of a hostile city council of his own plan to repay the banks. But in the primary October 2, Kucinich ran 11,228 votes behind Voinovich. Kucinich has heavy union support, but Voinovich is outspending him more than two to one. The deciding factor in the run-off may turn out to be the death of Voinovich's nine-year-old daughter, who was hit by a van October...