The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Rebecca Traister forcibly pulls aside our curtain of denial:

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!

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.

OK, sure, his reign as mayor of Cleveland was a mess. He has never passed a piece of legislation. He loves to flash peace signs that provoke flashbacks of your crazy Aunt Martha's annual Woodstock slide show. The fact that when you try to picture him at any sort of summit, you quickly envision Nicolas Sarkozy stealing his lunch money leads you to suspect that he might be an ineffective player on the world stage. He is a vegan. He has been compelled by his sense of honesty, and his close personal friendship with Shirley MacLaine, to disclose his encounters with extraterrestrial life. Also, he really does bear an unfortunate resemblance to a leprechaun. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[snip]
But here is the truth: If you believe in universal, single-payer healthcare and that campaign finance and electronic voting are corrupt; if you hate the Patriot Act and believe it erodes civil rights; if you believe that gay people should have the same rights as straight people, that America should rejoin the Kyoto Protocol and take steps to halt global warming, that we should invest in alternative fuel sources, that our water and air need to be protected from pollution and overuse, that the government should reduce the amount of money it spends on war and instead work to improve the country's education system, and that going to war in Iraq was a terrible and tragic mistake, then you are that guy playing air guitar, and he is you.

This is something I've thought about ever since I fumbled my answer to the "What about Kucinich" question last week when I called the morning show on our local Air America affiliate. Because let's face it: the Democratic candidate who best reflects progressive values is Dennis Kucinich. The problem is that he's a utopian. Many of us aren't quite ready to just succumb to the notion that any Democrat is light-years better than any Republican, especially when said Democrat regards lobbyists as people just like you and me and signs on to giving President 24% the cover he needs to embark on an ill-advised attack on Iran. But there's progressivism, and then there's mishegoss.

Last week I had a rather heated dispute with one of our commenters, a young person who like many of his generation hates the baby boomers because we "sold out." Is recognizing that a "Department of Peace", while laudable, just Isn't Going to Happen selling out? I hate the argument that "the perfect is the enemy of the good", but while it doesn't mean we should delude ourselves that Hillary Clinton is a progressive, wasting effort on an alternative that is never, ever going to get this nomination no matter how many bloggers endorse him, isn't all that much different from the libertarians writing position papers for the Ayn Rand Institute.

Kucinich's presence in the race makes it interesting in that it has the effect of nudging the eventual nominee (provided said nominee is not named "Hillary Clinton") to the left. He's unserious without having the kind of Grandpa Simpson Comic Relief that someone like Mike Gravel has. As entertaining as Kucinich may be on The Colbert Report, his repeated quixotic quests for the White House are starting to make him seem like a lefty Harold Stassen.

Doesn't mean I don't agree with him, though.