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http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/080703A.shtml<snip> That afternoon, barely able to lift my arms above my head, I was brought down to an organic foods co-op – essentially a vegetarian supermarket with a nice café on the second floor – to hear a quick speech by Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. He was there when we arrived, and I plowed through the crowd to get a view. Kucinich, I saw, was sporting a sharp new haircut, and was bristling with energy. He addressed the crowd very briefly and answered some questions. The man, I decided, has sand.
As he was headed for the door, someone told him I was there. Came then the shock of my life. Kucinich stopped dead, whirled around, and bulldogged through the crowd to find me. I smiled and reached out to shake his hand. He grabbed it and hauled me in until we were basically bumping chests and nose to nose. He did not give me the standard triple-pump politician handshake, but the triple-grip old-school activist handshake. He said an incredible number of nice things about my work, and about truthout, the very last thing I was expecting to hear. He only had a few seconds before he had to head off to his next speech, but a connection got made in that café that is difficult for me to deny. I am not the swooning type, but I felt after that like I had just come out of the hot sun. There aren’t many politicians who can do that to me.Interestingly, this is the same reaction to encountering Dennis that I've heard over and over from the people who've been lucky enough to meet up with him. That night, several activists and I went to hear Kucinich give a more formal address at a public theater. <more snipping> Then came Dennis. He reached the podium on the crest of a great ovation, and stood silently until the crowd hushed. And he waited. And he waited. And in that silence he began to sing, softly, “Oh say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave o’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?”
Kucinich then slammed the podium and roared, “Courage, America! Courage, America! Courage, America!” before spending the next 20 minutes denouncing the Bush administration, the war, and the direction this nation is moving in some of the most eloquent language I have yet heard. There is not a single Presidential candidate in the field willing to say when Kucinich said on that stage in San Diego, for good or ill. The crowd reacted as if they were coming out of the desert to find a pool of ice-water waiting for them. They drank it up and called for more.
I learned a few things on that road. I learned that a lot more people care about what is happening than the television would have us believe. I learned that just about everyone in the activist communities I met is ready and willing to join ABBA – the Anyone But Bush Association – to put aside their own hard-core preferences when the deal goes down to make sure that George is unemployed in January of 2005. I learned that, despite my sense on occasion that there isn’t anyone out there who feels as I do and is willing to act on it, there is an army of good people across the country doing just that. I learned that George has some tough sledding ahead of him.
I learned that Dennis Kucinich is still polling in the low single digits. The political campaign analyst in me understands this: He has less cash, a few wild ideas, and is less well-known. A lot of people think Dennis has no chance to win, and they well may be right. But I learned that, in the end, there is something profoundly wrong with a country where a man like Kucinich has no chance to win the Oval Office. The point of the exercise, I learned, was to change that.
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