Kucinich Drops Out; Irrational Analysis Goes Wild

Dennis Kucinich announced to the Cleveland Plain Dealer today that he’s dropping out of the Presidential race, or as he puts it “transitioning out.” (Video here as well)

Why does he put it that way? Mostly because he faces tough challenges in the Democratic primary to just keep his seat in Congress. The area of Cleveland he represents is liberal, but nowhere near as liberal as Kucinich is. He’s faced challengers in the past, but none were really well funded or well known. Now, after two failed attempts at the Presidency, he’s facing much more organized opposition. His pledge to only run for the presidency on the weekends (seriously) has expectedly backfired on him, leaving him begging for money to run ads for the primary. His opponents are getting big support, too, as they have been endorsed by the likes of the mayor of Cleveland and famed veteran Paul Hackett (who you may remember from an aborted Senate run, when he was not too pleased with Chuck Schumer. After refusing to debate any primary challengers for years (which I discussed here), Kucinich has finally agreed to a debate this cycle.

Before he agreed to the debate, one of his opponents, Joe Cimperman, actually went to his office with a video camera to ask where he was. Kucinich responded by … demanding the Federal Protective Service (an agency under DHS) investigate. Seriously. Why? Kucinich argues that a video camera in the office would discourage constituents from visiting him. A valid point, but worthy of an investigation? No, there’s not even any constituents in the video.

On top of this, we get absurd analysis from the normally somewhat reasonable TPM Election Central:

Two factors likely pushed him out of the race: a) The public calendar forced him to choose between continuing his candidacy versus running for re-election, and b) The cable news networks stopped inviting him to debates, due to his very poor showings in the caucuses and primaries so far, thus depriving him of a high-profile venue for promoting his platform.

Not being in the debates anymore did not stop Kucinich. He was in plenty of debates up until the past three and got exactly no traction out of them whatsoever.

More importantly, though, on the calendar point. He’s making this choice not because of the calendar, but because of the strength of the opposition. He famously stayed in the race until the convention in 2004, even earning the ire of the FEC for doing so.

I’m going to conclude with some thoughts from the very good Buckeye State Blog on Kucinich. It’s made clear this is not a rant about policy, but instead is a look at his character:

His sudden switch from an adament and reliable pro-life Democrat to a pro-choice Democrat before his first presidential run is a bit too Mitt Romney for me.

And as a potential President, I don’t see him being any better than a left-wing version of Bush. Like our current President, Kucinich is myopic, viewing his entire political environment through unbending and narrow ideological blinders. He openly drips with disdain of any institution, organization, or person who dares disagree with his world view. He sees compromise as a cancer of democracy, not a healthy and necessary act. He refuses to compromise and expects to dictate his terms and have the world follow.

And then there’s the hypocracy and the lying. Despite claiming that he is the only politician who represents the interest of “the people,” he has shown no remorse for lying to his constitutents during his recent re-election when he told them he would focus on the needs of his district and explicitly promised not to run for President only to announce his presidential campaign a month after securing his re-election. At least nobody has died from Kucinich’s lie, but then again perhaps anyone who believed either politicians lie deserves to be deceived as their true motives could not have been more transparent.

And then there was last week. Pissed because he was disinvited from MSNBC’s Nevada presidential debates, Kucinich filed legal action after legal action calling it an affront to democracy to exclude him (and, apparently, only him as he never stood to the defense of Senator Gravel, the other candidate excluded from the debate.) Instead of accepting the rational explanation that he is simply not a viable candidate, not because MSNBC says so, but because so far the entire Democratic electorate who have yet to award him a single delegate to our party’s convention and no signs that he is expected to be a factor in the race at all, but because of some ridiculous military-industrial complex conspiracy theory that it has something to do with GE’s corporate ownership of the network. Never mind that until voters started voting, MSNBC and other “corporate networks” included him in countless debates.