Whether or not Kucinich gets the democratic nomination, I’ll be voting for him. As I’ve read more into him, looked at his voting record, and watched him in the debates, I’ve only become more and more impressed. He’s the only candidate besides Paul who doesn’t come off as a dyed in the wool politician. And don’t get me wrong, he’s been a politician his whole life, but he seems unwilling to play the political games that pollute public office holders.
He’s been getting badly treated in the media, and in the debates, but I encourage you to hit up youtube and watch his performance in the debates for the few moments he’s given. He’s intelligent, eloquent, and direct. He doesn’t dance around the questions and weasel out of hard ones. He has real answers based on real policies.
I thought long and hard about whether I could vote for Clinton if she gets the nomination. And I just can’t. She seems to have no compunction about taking money from the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies to prevent any meaningful change in the US healthcare system (the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US). She has consistently voted to support the Iraq war, and the patriot act (i.e. spying on Americans), and won’t make firm promises to get us out of Iraq in a short time frame, or return our civil liberties. While she is distainful of Bush, she seems enamored of the power he’s seized for the executive branch, and unwilling to make firm promises to relinquish it.
I genuinely like Barak Obama, and he seems like a really good guy who would try his best to reform some of the ways we’ve gone wrong. But he also seems to be trapped in the partisan political big money game. Washington politics are profoundly broken, and we need someone who will refuse to participate in a broken system, who will instead recognize it, and change it. I don’t get that from Barak. I get that from Kucinich.
Both Clinton and Obama support Military action as a possibility in Iran, and support Iran sanctions despite IAEA inspectors finding no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and almost no evidence of Iran sponsoring Iraqi militants (the only evidence they have is bomb fragments with iranian markings, no direct evidence of arms supplying or state sponsorship). Whatever evidence Hillary and Barak are seeing to justify their positions, I haven’t seen it, and I suspect it would be of the same quality as the intelligence that lead us into Iraq.
I’m not alone here. When asked strictly about issues, not candidates, Kucinich is resoundingly the number one representative of America’s values. It speaks volumes about our current elections process, including the media coverage of it, that Kucinich is portrayed as a marginal candidate, and in some cases a nutjob. By all accounts, he should be the democratic front runner by far.
FWIW: I’m a big supporter of a single-payer not-for-profit healthcare system. This is NOT the same thing as government run healtcare. It simply means that insurance companies will not be allowed to make a profit (which they do primarily by denying claims), and that the government will be the one paying the premiums, co-pays, etc. While it may seem strange for a Libertarian to be in support of universal healthcare, I look at this primarily as a cost savings. Under Kucinich’s proprosal, you would actually spend less on healthcare than you do now, primarily because a good deal of what you currently pay for healthcare is spent rewarding the rich in the form of stock dividends, marketing and CEO and executive pay. Why are we paying these people to bankrupt us?
Also FWIW: Kucinich is the only one willing to impeach. I support impeachment. We impeached Clinton for lying about a BJ. I think it’s pretty clear that the Bush administration has been lying consistently for their entire time in office. Now, while they haven’t necessarily lied under oath, that’s partially because they have refused to testify about anything under oath under the umbrella of state secrets. It’s time for that crap to end. And apparently the main body of democrats is willing to just cope until the current term is up because they don’t want to look bad in an election year. So instead, they’re going after croneys. I’m not saying we have to throw Bush out of office, but I think he does need to answer, under oath, for a whole lot of crap his administration has done, and it’s clear that this won’t happen any other way.