Friday, March 9, 2012
The Final Congressional Resume of Dennis Kucinich
Posted By Vince Grzegorek vgrzegorek@clevescene.com> on Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 2:20 PM
Dennis Kucinich lost his battle against Marcy Kaptur earlier this week, and with that the end of his time in Congress is drawing near.
A liberal sweetheart, boisterous and outspoken, a champion of Cleveland, a vocal opponent of war, owner of a pocket-sized Constitution — there seemed so much that he stood for.
But as The New Yorker points out, things that actually get done actually matter, and in that realm, Kucinich's resume was paltry.
When Kucinich lost a primary fight against his fellow Ohio Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur on Tuesday (the two incumbents were pitted against each other due to redistricting), liberals lost one of their favorite elected officials, and the press lost one of its favorite sources of comic relief. But Congress did not lose a leader.I made this same basic point about Kucinich in March of 2010. At the time, he’d only succeeded in passing three of the bills he sponsored. Those three were, in chronological order:
A bill “to make available to the Ukranian Museum and Archives the USIA television program ‘Window on America,’ ” a bill “to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 14500 Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio as the ‘John P. Gallagher Post Office Building” and a bill “proclaiming Casimir Pulaski to be an honorary citizen of the United States posthumously.”
In the two years since then, Kucinich has gotten one more bill passed. It named another post-office building in Cleveland.
There's still time for Kucinich to do something else. That, however, does not seem likely.
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