The King of Spin

The man charged with averting disaster was the city's 24-year-old finance director, whose only work experience was a nine-month stint at Merrill Lynch. The acting police chief was a 21-year-old college coed with wispy bangs. The inevitable implosion of Kucinich's scorched-earth rise to mayor had arrived.

As a city councilman, he had climbed the ranks of Cleveland politics through a strategy of nonstop combat, fighting everyone from colleagues to businessmen, bankers to bureaucrats. He accused them of being corrupt, lazy, and unsympathetic to the city's white working class — his largest sect of voters. If council was for tax abatements, Kucinich accused them of being in the pocket of business. If they wanted housing for the East Side's black poor, he castigated them for ignoring the West Side's ethnic whites. If you weren't with him, you were his enemy, and Kucinich spared no sound bites in illuminating your sins.

"It's not every day in Cleveland or any other city that you have the mayor calling the city council a bunch of lunatics and buffoons," says Brent Larkin, The Plain Dealer's editorial director, who covered Kucinich's reign for the now-defunct Cleveland Press. "You don't call everybody a bunch of fucking crooks, and that's what he did."

Kucinich may have been right about corruption and lethargy, but he was now proving to be a much worse alternative. After all, a mayor's job is a yeoman's task, about paving streets and ensuring safety. But Kucinich had allowed style to manhandle substance; he was against everything, rather than providing solutions of his own.

"If you are mayor, you have to do things," says Mike Roberts, The Plain Dealer's former city editor. "There was nothing that he did of any success, unless it was self-serving."

City dwellers who could afford to flee did so in droves. Everyone else was holding on for dear life. "The town had a nervous breakdown during [Kucinich's] mayoralty," Larkin says. "He wore everybody out."

Yet almost 30 years later, Kucinich has managed to recast this period as his greatest triumph. In the revised telling, this isn't a story of a mayor who hurled the city into chaos with startling swiftness. It's a rewritten David and Goliath tale, with Kucinich playing the role as the only man with the cojones to stand up to corruption and nefarious corporations. His presidential campaign paints a man of sturdy principles, unsinkable optimism, and untainted liberal bona fides — a mythology now being regurgitated by everyone from supporters to the national media.

The "people's mayor," he is called. The "worker's president," he dubs himself.

"It's Kucinich time, now," wrote Cleveland native Scott Raab in his gushing Esquire profile.

"Kucinich has made a life and career of overcoming obstacles, challenging expectations and making unpopular decisions simply by trusting his gut," lavished the Chicago Tribune.

But if history tells us anything, it's that Kucinich will play any role to his advantage — be it race-baiter or liberal purist — only to spin himself a new image the next day. It's a formula that hasn't changed in 40 years.

"He has done a spectacular job of rewriting history," Larkin says. ". . . You can neither understand nor appreciate Dennis unless you were here then. You had to have lived through it — and, God, it was incredible."

His ambition was evident from the start: Before Kucinich was even in high school, he'd already penned a 30-page autobiography. It detailed the life of a working-class kid — son of an Irish mother and a Croatian truck-driving father. He was the eldest of seven children, who sometimes found themselves living out of the family car whenever Dad couldn't find work.

After graduating from St. John Cantius High School, 17-year-old Kucinich moved out of his family's home on East 71st Street and into a $50-a-month apartment on the outskirts of Tremont.

At the time, the neighborhood was a fiercely Catholic area, where Polish and Hungarian were spoken as often as English. These were the days when Cleveland wasn't merely divided by race, but by myriad ethnic rivalries. White people weren't simply "white," but Italian, Romanian, or Greek. And the people of Tremont believed they were getting the shortest end of the stick, ignored at the behest of Irish and black.

In 1967, just five days before he was old enough to vote, Kucinich filed petitions to run for City Council. He lost by 500 votes to the neighborhood's nine-term incumbent, John Bilinski.

Kucinich kept himself busy with classes at Cleveland State, morning shifts as a surgical technician at St. Alexis Hospital, and evening stints as a copy boy at The Plain Dealer. At the end of a workweek, he easily logged 80 hours.