In last weekend’s Brown and Black Democratic Presidential Candidates Forum in Des Moines, Iowa, candidates were finally given a chance to ask one another the toughest questions confronting them this campaign season.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, took the opportunity to give some much-needed on-air time to someone he feels has been greatly neglected: himself.
“Congressman Kucinich,” he began. “Is it true that you’re the only one sitting up here who advocates a universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health-care system, which would result in all 46 million Americans who are not insured and another 50 million Americans who are underinsured for being covered?”
“And the answer to that question is, it is true,” he replied. “It is time that we declare that health care is a basic right in a Democratic society, and I’m asking all of my friends up here to join me in that so that the American people will be the winners of this election.”
The congressman has been fighting a lack of recognition in his campaign for many months, but he recently took it as a compliment when rival Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., left him out of a campaign ad featuring the other candidates.
The crux of the Biden ad emphasized that the front-runners for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards have all agreed with Biden on a number of topics.
Kucinich proudly separates himself from the rest, with his campaign issuing a statement saying, “There’s a reason that Congressman Kucinich was the only candidate deliberately excluded from the ad blitz. Joe Biden knows, and the other Democratic candidates know, that Dennis Kucinich doesn’t walk their line,” the Boston Globe reported. “If voters are dissatisfied with the Biden tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees, they should vote for someone who represents their beliefs and their values.”
Kucinich is enjoying some media attention, however. A recent article in LA Weekly recently detailed a few minutes in the life of the long-shot candidate.
In the piece, Dwayne Booth writes, “Looking back on my brief encounters with Kucinich, I remember something that my grandmother once said while watching Larry King’s very famous and excruciatingly respectful 1992 interview with Richard Nixon, that given the choice between being a turd or a flower in life, I should consider being a turd. ‘Flowers are always getting trounced upon,’ she said. ‘At least a turd commands enough respect to be stepped around.’ And perhaps that’s what I found to be the real tragedy about Dennis Kucinich: He is neither a turd nor a flower. But he may well be the best chance we have as a nation to save ourselves.”
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