Is Kucinich a threat?
The Washington Post has a profile of Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D), who is apparently "exploring" a presidential bid. Kucinich is strongly anti-war, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that this represents a threat to Dean. The TNR blog as usual takes a hard line, calling Kucinich "Howard Dean's worst nightmare" :
The TNR blog's implacable hostility to Dean blinds them to the obvious counter-argument - Dean is still running as a progressive. Unconventional on certain issues of principle, but ultimately a progressive. Kucinich's abortion stance waffling and his flag-burning voting record are serious black marks against women's rights and free speech. How can he be taken seriously?
The only issue on which Kucinich is any kind of challenge is the war, and frankly I don't think that a single-issue candidate can survive, and while Kucinich has received some media attention, he is too one-dimensional to represent a real threat, unless annointed by the media.
The real loser in all of this has to be Howard Dean. As the Post also points out, Kucinich will be making the very same anti-Iraq case to Iowa activists that Dean has been making for months--only without Dean's tortured qualification about supporting war if there were convincing evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or whatever Dean is saying these days. And Kucinich also steps on Dean's unconventional-liberal schtick. Dean supporters spend a lot of time playing up their man's fiscal conservatism and his opposition to gun control. Kucinich, it turns out, opposes abortion and has voted for a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. The more you think about it, the more it seems like Dennis Kucinich leaves Howard Dean without a constituency.
The TNR blog's implacable hostility to Dean blinds them to the obvious counter-argument - Dean is still running as a progressive. Unconventional on certain issues of principle, but ultimately a progressive. Kucinich's abortion stance waffling and his flag-burning voting record are serious black marks against women's rights and free speech. How can he be taken seriously?
The only issue on which Kucinich is any kind of challenge is the war, and frankly I don't think that a single-issue candidate can survive, and while Kucinich has received some media attention, he is too one-dimensional to represent a real threat, unless annointed by the media.
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