I believe!!, page 1

Kucinich's ideas, if not exactly correct on many issues, are at least not without their charm, but he is a fairly hopeless candidate. That perhaps is more an issue for the candidate advocacy forum though.

In the broader frame of US Politics though, Kucinich is an interesting case study on the impatience and lack of cohesion which plague reformers.

He is in a position to be a major player in American politics, but probably not as a president. His strong hold in Ohio makes him a good candidate to take control of a vital swing state for his ideology and have a profound impact on his party's policies. He should be focusing on finding like-minded, qualified people who he can help into neighboring districts in an attempt to make Ohio more friendly to progressives, which would exert a strong influence on Democratic primaries (something he has tried very hard to do by staying in elections he couldn't win, but which Dean and Kerry ignored).

This is no easy matter of course. You can't just wave a magic wand and make the people of Ohio overwhelmingly support all of Kucinich's ideas. What you can do however is foster cooperation between smaller groups under a slightly more moderate unified front that would bring together the 8-16% of people who would vote Kucinich in a presidential primary along with Greens and others and use their power to make overtures of compromise to moderates from an organization that isn't yet stigmatized by media handling of Kucinich (who definately gets played down as a whacko by national media).

I think he really does himself a disservice by spending the money and political capital that his relatively small following can give him on presidential races he can't win. He'd be better off working to get allies elected to congress, or even to state legislatures. He needs to put his ideology in a position to show the American people results before he can expect broad national support.

If by some miracle he were elected president, it would probably be a disaster for him anyway. The establishment eats accidental presidents alive. When you start changing things, you make enemies, and sooner or later, you will need the people you made enemies with.

Carter had that problem. He was not what the establishment wanted, but the establishment was on the outs with the public for killing Kennedy and starting Vietnam; they were destined to lose control at some point, and 76 is when it happened. Carter was their lesser of available evils. He ticked off congress by stepping on too many toes with his push to cut spending and congress retaliated. The hostage crisis was just icing on the cake- a president who was not already fighting with a congress of his own party might have survived by virtue of doing something with the economy.

Kucinich would have a hard time getting single payer health care through congress, they would probably slow down his Iraq exit strategy, he would probably lose ground in congress to the Republicans in 2010, and he would end up being a one term president.

He needs patience.