It's April 19, 2024, 11:19:38 AM
Around the United states, you have HUNDREDS of local mayors who are all very, very intelligent and passionate people who generally care about helping people. Elect them president.
Arnold - I was glad to see him win, because he's somebody who isn't going to fake it. He's full of optimism, he's a hard worker, he's trying his best, and the absoulte only reason he's doing it, is because he thinks he can make a change, and wants to help people.
al sharpton is a piece of shit. an im not sayin cuz im white an hes black. most black people in ny will even agree with me an says hes a asshole. they kno hes only out for himself. look whenever hes in the media.... hes only there cuz it benefitting him some how
Kucinich is the only person running for president right now that I have complete faith that he truly believes in his job. Honestly, the man in 1978, when he was the youngest mayor of a major American city in history, ran into a problem. I'ma use the old copy paste method from the LA Times, 'cause I'm too tired to type it out myself, and the LA Times says it better anyways... lol But what happened put his political career back 15 years, but he stuck by his beliefs, and did what he felt was right. In the end, people realized he was right too.The date was Dec. 15, 1978, and Kucinich — precocious, pugnacious and ambitious — was, at 31, the nation's youngest big-city mayor. He had won office on a promise to cancel the sale of Cleveland's municipal power company, Muny Light, to a competing private utility. But six banks threatened not to renew the city's credit on $15 million in loans unless Kucinich agreed to sell by midnight.Downstairs in the Italian-marbled City Hall, Cleveland's treasurer and the president of one of the banks watched the minutes tick by, waiting to see if Kucinich would back down. Upstairs, the mayor and council bickered. Kucinich stood firm. The clock struck midnight, and Cleveland became the first American city to default on its debts since the Great Depression.The boyish-looking 5-foot-7, 140-pound mayor, nicknamed Dennis the Menace by the business community he had alienated, held to his belief that the private utility, Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., and its banking friends, most of whom were CEI shareholders, were out to gouge the city.If Muny Light had been swallowed by CEI, he believed, it would have cost Cleveland millions of dollars in higher rates and especially burdened working-class homeowners."Two things about Dennis have never changed," said Jack Schulman, a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked in the beleaguered Kucinich administration. "One, he is absolutely honest and you never have to wonder whether he's taken a position because someone bought him off. Two, he's committed to working people."The default, and the exile that followed, became both Kucinich's political coffin and his eventual springboard to redemption. It clung to him like a shadow, from the West where he fled after the Cleveland debacle in pursuit of a new life to Iowa and New Hampshire where, in the winter of 2004, he campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination using a light bulb as his symbol and the slogan "Light Up America.""You come to certain moments in your life, which are key and defining moments, which tell a lot about who you are," Kucinich told Cleveland magazine in 1996. "And for me, everything came down to that moment. Who I was. Where I'd been. Who I grew up with. How I grew up. What my aspirations were. What I hoped to do. What I hoped to be…. And it all came down to my saying, 'No, I'm not going to sell that electric system no matter what the consequences are to me personally.' "After the default, Kucinich survived a recall by 236 votes. But savaged in the local media and unpopular with the black and business communities, the Police Department and city hall bureaucrats, he was swept out of office in a landslide in 1979. He had dreamed as a child of being Cleveland's mayor, and his two-year fulfillment of that dream had been marked by tumult, national derision and, in the end, a humiliating defeat. ......But even his critics came to admit that Kucinich was formidable. Knocked out of the political arena in 1979, he returned to Cleveland from his Western wanderings in 1983 and won a seat on the council."I don't think anyone, including me, thought this was a big comeback," he said. "I was only back to where I started. But I was reconnected."Perhaps more important, Clevelanders were starting to believe Kucinich had been right about Muny Light, especially after members of a congressional staff concluded, in 1980, that the default had been politically motivated. History was about to be rewritten by the loser.In 1993, then-Cleveland Mayor Michael White cited Kucinich's "wisdom" in not selling the utility, and in 1998 the council honored the deposed mayor for having the "courage and foresight" to stand up to the banks. The utility, now known as Cleveland Public Power, provides low-cost electricity that saved the city an estimated $195 million between 1985 and 1995. One of the new buildings in its expanded plant is named for Kucinich
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