Try talking to Dennis Kucinich about how the media treats him, as I did over the course of a few days last week in New Hampshire, and you begin to see a different paradigm for how a presidential campaign can be run. It has proven to be frustrating to many who see his candidacy as lacking the one thing that is needed in order to win, and that is the press’ validation. The stumbling block has been that people say they might vote for him but since the press doesn’t report on him, they don’t know where he stands on most issues.
With that thought in mind, I had the opportunity to ask him the question: How does it make him feel that the press does not give him his due as a valid candidate for the presidency?
When Kucinich is asked a question, he never answers it directly. He is not evasive or buying time in order to find his answer. In fact, when he needs to think, he does so, silently. He generally answers all questions within the context of how the answer to the question occurred to him, i.e., the process by which he came to that conclusion. While he is doing that, answering the question at hand, behind the façade there is the look of a marathon man. This man is going to be answering these questions nonstop for hours and days to come and has been answering them for weeks and months prior to your placing the microphone in his face. Therefore, you might think that the answer is pat or a recitation he could do in his sleep, but that would not be true.
Because each answer to the questioner deserves two things: the context in which the answer came to him and meeting the interlocutor person to person. I expected to see him display some anger at the press that treats him so shabbily. I asked him, as an example of how badly he is treated, what he felt at the “debate” in Las Vegas on CNN when he was not asked about Pakistan, even though he kept shouting at Blitzer to acknowledge him. His gaze at me said more than his words did, and that is the strength and weakness of this type of campaign. He is not angry at the press. He talks not about bad people, but corrupt systems (his words) and how a press that is run for corporate profits is not going to want to do anything to further his chances of becoming president just as they didn’t want him to become mayor of Cleveland. His answer may seem pat and a way of comforting himself but I think he believes it: “The American people know the truth when they hear it. The truth will out.”
What his campaign staff knows is that the press has never treated him any different from the way they are treating him now. Reading through his essays and listening to the Congressman speak on the campaign trail, there is a great deal to be said about the consistency with which the press has treated him and which he expects them to continue to treat him.
Kucinich’s other response to the question as to why the press basically ignores him or tries to marginalize him was also something he learned while running for the city council in Cleveland—his opposition to corporate interests in favor of the working people has always been a hallmark of his drive to be in public office. His entire career as a public official, beginning with that early and difficult battle over the public utility in Cleveland, has shaped his understanding of whose interests the media serve.
It is fortunate that today his campaign can connect to those with an internet connection through kucinichtv.com. His young campaign interns have set up this internet television station for him where the videos of his events can be broadcast, as well as the Constitutional Initiative which is a crash course in what the Constitution actually says as well as his attempt to help further the discussion and understanding of the document that guides the government of this country. But the part that he seems to enjoy and be the best at is the tried and true medium of public discourse.
His further answer to the question of how he feels about not getting the media recognition that would give his campaign a big boost was that he is going to dozens of venues all over the state of New Hampshire and talking to hundreds of people at a time. He feels a groundswell of interest building. He asked me if I didn’t feel that too? Didn’t it seem as if he was reaching people and getting them to listen to his message and to begin to be as energized by it as he was? “The response is building, I feel a groundswell of interest in the campaign, and that is encouraging.”
He was also referring to the reception he had received from the students that afternoon at the College Convention 2008, which had been held at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, NH. Upon leaving the hall after listening to him speak three African-American student leaders from Louisiana had commented that “he sounded like Martin.” One of Kucinich’s staff had heard that comment and gotten the three young men to speak on tape about how Dennis Kucinich had moved them. They were generous in their praise of him because they felt he spoke to what they were struggling with—housing issues, health care, the cost of an education. That is the kind of excitement and acknowledgement the Congressman refers to when he says he feels a groundswell moving his campaign forward.
There is certainly something anachronistic in the way he perceives things. But using the modern technology of the internet in combination with the knock on every door and speak to every voter technique that got him elected 40 years ago in Cleveland, Kucinich hopes to keep that momentum going while staying absolutely true to the progressive values and agenda that guide his campaign. How far a candidate can go with this is anyone’s guess. We haven’t had this type of national campaign to look at historically, but it most definitely will serve as a model of the benefits and deficits of a national campaign that cannot count on the mainstream media to get its message out.
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