EVERY FACTION, SHALL BE EXALTED:

The Optimist (MARSHALL SELLA, December 21, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

Orange County is ostensibly Reagan Country, but there are 325 non-Republicans who turn out to hear the fiery congressman give his eight-minute stump speech. It's hard to tell what has unified them. Since Kucinich resides at the left of his party (to the point where Ralph Nader has threatened to run in 2004 if anyone but Kucinich is the Democratic nominee), it seems that every faction of the left has come out and tossed up an information stand of some sort. You can stroll by a rackety table marked ISRAEL HOLOCAUST AGAINST PALESTINE; another pleading with you to FREE THE CUBAN FIVE; and don't forget the COLOMBIA PEACE PROJECT. There are Greens, Socialists and New Agers of every stripe. To judge from the fashion tastes of the crowd, someone would be wise to set up a table selling muumuus.

Candidate Kucinich emerges to the expected fanfare. As he takes the stage and begins to speak, he lists ''the real weapons of mass destruction.'' While he does, children march out with cardboard cutouts in the shapes of bombs, but with the actual culprits scrawled on the cardboard: poverty, poor health care, poor education and so forth. Kucinich stands, absorbing the love in his rolled-up blue shirt sleeves. The crowd is treated to ''We Are the World''; kids holding the bomb shapes sway along with the music, as if poverty and its friends have joined Hands Across America.

Unlike the unpolished speakers who have gone before, Kucinich is a firebrand. He jabs the air at all the right moments; he rails against the administration's failure to find W.M.D., at its hideous lies, at the fact that it ''led this nation into a war under a pretense.''

''Bring our troops home,'' the candidate shouts. ''Louder!'' And the crowd replies in kind, 10 times over, each time louder than the last.

Dennis Kucinich is easy to like.

Like? We love 'im. Hopefully he and the Reverend Al will still in the race until the bitter end.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 20, 2003 7:37 AM