Dennis Kucinich and Thursday's Iowa Presidential Debate

The Des Moines Register, however, does not recognize a home office as a campaign office.

This is what they sent to the Kucinich campaign when it protested his exclusion from Thursday’s (Dec. 13) debate:

“It was our determination that a person working out of his home did not meet our criteria for a campaign office and full-time paid staff in Iowa.”

So is a full-time person on salary and working well more than 40 hours a week not a full-time person because he doesn't waste time and energy lugging his cell phone and laptop from one address to another twice a day?

Yes, the Des Moines Register has determined, arbitrarily, that a campaign must have real estate in Iowa, a storefront, to be a legitimate campaign.

Two things wrong with that. The concept that only landed gentry should be eligible to participate in the political process is an idea that we threw out, not in the last century, but in the century before that.

And if a storefront is necessary before you can do business in Iowa, then Amazon.com is ineligible to do business in Iowa. Ebay is ineligible to do business in Iowa.

You see what I mean?

The Kucinich campaign is a very internet-connected effort, which does not spend money needlessly. It is, in fact, running the kind of energy-efficient campaign most of the American public wants.

The criteria used to keep the Kucinich message from Iowa voters, and from the American people, is arbitrary, capricious, and downright silly. But also dangerous. We cannot as a nation have corporations such as the Des Moines Register determining our political dynamic.

Why would the Des Moines Register do that?

For the same reason that the AARP excluded Kucinich from its Presidential Health Care forum earlier this fall here in Iowa. The AARP did not want people to hear his message of national, not-for-profit health care, already embodied in a bill before Congress (HR 676). Why? Because AARP sells health insurance. The Conyers/Kucinich plan to guarantee health care to everyone in America excludes private health insurance, because that is the only way a national health care plan can work financially. And that makes that plan a direct threat to that part of AARP’s business.

I might add that AARP’s willingness to hear about the health care plans of the other presidential candidates tells you that none of those health care plans would be a threat to AARP. Okay?

And clearly the Des Moines Register newspaper likewise does not want people to hear Dennis’ other messages –

on how he is the only Democratic presidential candidate to vote against the Iraq War and against every funding bill for that war;

that he has introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney (now in committee for review) and that he is drawing up similar ones against President Bush;

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