I don’t doubt that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is a nice guy. By all indications, he has a specific worldview that shapes his beliefs, he’s earnest and sincere, and he’s clearly passionate about liberal causes.
But the notion that he’s going to be elected president is terribly far-fetched. It’s almost ceratinly not going to happen. Kucinich will no doubt say all the right things about being “optimistic” about his chances, but I suspect even he realizes that, come January 2009, he won’t be taking the oath of office.
So, why bother? The WaPo explored this in an interesting piece today by Zachary Goldfarb, who seemed hesitant to come right out and say it, but suggested that Kucinich and other long-shot candidates are kind of delusional.
Fred I. Greenstein, a professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University and one of the major scholars of political psychology, says politicians — including some accomplished ones — have trouble knowing their limitations. He said candidates exhibit a tendency “where faith triumphs over reason and empirical reality-testing falls by the wayside, and a lot of what drives people is some combination of vanity and lack of self-perspective.”
David G. Winter, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who has devised ways to classify the motivations of presidential candidates, says the long shots might well be subject to what he calls the affiliation motive: They surround themselves with people who exhort their campaigns and praise their ideas.
“It puts them in a bubble such that they aren’t able to look honestly at the whole picture,” he said.
The argument is not without merit, but I have a hard time applying the “affiliation motive” to Kucinich specifically. He just doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d surround himself with a bunch of sycophants, all of whom believe (and keep telling their candidate) that Kucinich really will be the next president of the United States.
Instead, I think this is about making a kind of point.
Kucinich, I imagine, believes that the top-tier candidates aren’t nearly liberal enough, so by running, he can help shape the debate. By articulating a very progressive worldview, Kucinich thinks he can drag other candidates, who stand a better chance of success, closer to him and his agenda. I suspect Kucinich genuinely believes in the power of his ideas, and by running for president, he gives those ideas a platform. It’s not about ego or delusion; it’s about the cause.
Except — and here’s the bad news for Kucinich fans — he’s mistaken. This approach doesn’t seem to work at all.
In 2004, during a radio debate in Iowa, Kucinich held up a chart about the budget. The moderator explained that this wasn’t being televised — and charts don’t work well on radio where listeners can’t see them. Kucinich said, “Gov. Dean can see it.” It was kind of sweet, in a way. In most of these debates, candidates are trying to score points and impress voters; in this debate, Kucinich really just wanted to explain a policy point to Howard Dean, in the hopes that he’d end up agreeing with him.
But he didn’t, and therein lies the point. Kucinich thought he could drag the field to the left in 2004, but he couldn’t. Not at all. “Pressure” from the Kucinich campaign was non-existent. In order to get rival candidates to shift ideological gears, a “make-a-point” candidate has to actually garner some fairly significant support. Kucinich didn’t seriously compete in any primary or caucus anywhere. At no point did it occur to a rival candidate, “Well, I guess I better move to the left to pick up some of these Kucinich supporters.”
In all likelihood, 2008 will be very similar. Kucinich will very earnestly make his case, he’ll get a podium in the debates, the other candidates will campaign without him in mind, and he likely will finish no better than sixth in any state.
I suppose my point is that the WaPo article pointed to the wrong delusion. Kucinich isn’t in some kind of bubble that prevents him from understanding he won’t win the presidency; but rather, that he’s in some kind of bubble that prevents him from understanding that he won’t have the impact he wants on the presidential race.