One Song, One Vote

It's a Monday afternoon and things are looking bad. Five days prior, I was given permission by a person named Robert to visit the Kucinich for President campaign headquarters. As of today, Robert's name is no longer listed on the Kucinich website staff directory. My calls go straight to voicemail.

My mission to observe the folks behind this quixotic campaign appears in to be in jeopardy. I call Jessica Flagg, the campaign's volunteer coordinator.

"No one's answering at the headquarters," I tell her.

"I can't say for sure if anyone's there," she says. "See, we do things in a kind of decentralized way. People just grab flyers and hit the streets. That's the beauty of it. But if you want to meet with me in person, you're welcome to come by my house. I'll cook dinner."

"If no one's at the headquarters, I'll be happy to," I say. Then, recalling her candidate's penchant for nuts and berries: "Do you mind my asking if the meal will be vegan?"

"I have a steak in my refrigerator."

"I'll be there at six."

I write down her Riverdale address and take the R train downtown. The headquarters is on the 31st floor of 225 Broadway, across the street from City Hall. As I take the elevator I envision a small but committed group of people working phones and mailing flyers. I arrive to find a tiny conference room in a shared office. It's empty.

"Is this the Kucinich headquarters?" I ask a woman who is working in a nearby cubicle.

"Yes, but I think they're out for the day. Check their office on the 26th floor. Room 2625."

The door is marked Locker Associates. I assume the space belongs to a private company doing double-duty as a Kucinich campaign location. This is more than reasonable, given that a renting office space in Manhattan could bankrupt any political campaign.

A young man opens the door. This office is vacant except for him and a middle-aged guy with white hair and a white beard. I introduce myself.

"You're with what?" asks the older one. "The New York Press? What do you want?"

"I'm here to check out the Kucinich campaign office and I?"

"This isn't the office," he says. Behind him are stacks of Kucinich posters, bumper stickers and flyers. "It's upstairs on 31."

"But there's no one there and a woman who works next to them said your office was?"

"Did you hear what I said? This isn't the office!" The younger man is staring at the floor and shaking his head as if to say, I know, I know.

The man continues. "And what about the bathroom?" Now he's walking closer to me and pointing a finger at my chest. "Did you ever think of that? Did you? People do use them, you know."

He picks up the phone and dials a number.

"No answer," he says. "No one's there. Now get out of here."

"What's that guy's name?" I ask the young guy who's shoving me out the door.

"Mike Locker," he whispers.

Mike Locker, I will soon see on the official Kucinich website, is the campaign's coordinating committee chairman. The phone number listed is the phone number to the office from which I was thrown out.

Three hours later, I'm in the Bronx.

"Do you want to hear my Dennis Kucinich song?"

I'm sitting across a table from Jessica Flagg, a 51-year-old former corporate headhunter with the energy of a coed working her first student campaign. Moments earlier, we'd decided to nix the cooking idea. Instead we're eating at the Land & Sea restaurant on 230th and Broadway.

"Excuse me?"

"My Dennis Kucinich song. I wrote it. I have a guitar in my apartment. I mean, I'm not that good or anything but?"

"That sounds great. But I have to ask you a blunt question."

"Shoot."

"Why support a guy who isn't electable? I don't think he's hit higher than two percent in any poll, and there's really no chance he'll win in New York."

Her eyes light up.

"Well, I think the word 'electability' is one of those words that's been manufactured. When you look at it, he's the only one who voted against the Patriot Act, who voted against the war, who basically was never fooled by this administration.

"This is an administration that has never told the truth from the day it walked in the door. Every single piece of legislation, every legislative initiative, from their Friendly Forests turning into 'let's cut down more trees,' to Clean Skies meaning 'we'll let power plants upgrade without putting in pollution controls.' What I'm saying to you is that everything this administration has ever done has just been a lie.

"So why was it that Dennis was the only one out of all these candidates who saw that? And if you're going to talk about electability, what's really going on is that the Democratic Party doesn't have leadership. And they're trying to promote the leadership that they want to see, which is a DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] type of Democrat, someone's who's beholden to the party for God knows what.

"And they're not going to go rocking the boat. But that's not Dennis. He's a rocking-the-boat kind of a guy."

"So what do you think of Bill Clinton?" I ask.

"I thought he was a disaster. He ruined the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton was the reason Ralph Nader ran."

"But be honest. Do you ever feel like you're part of a lost cause?"

"You know, people were happy to hear Dennis Kucinich had a campaign. But it's true, we do get people saying 'He's right on all the issues, but I don't think he's electable.' What that means to me is that people don't have any faith in their hopes and dreams and desires. My job is to try to get peozple to believe in themselves again."

"You're starting to inspire me. I think I should I hear the song now."

We exit the restaurant and jump into her Mazda. She fires up the ignition and we screech out of the parking space. "I run red lights," she warns me as she shifts from first gear to third. We careen around a curve, cut through a gas station parking lot and blow a stop sign. "Sorry," she says as we barely miss a Lincoln Town Car. "Guess that was bad, right?"

Inside Flagg's apartment?a mountain of posters, buttons, pamphlets and flyers bearing Kucinich's craggily half-smiling face. She repairs to the kitchen, I sit on her couch, she returns with a guitar. As she gives the instrument an introductory strum, her cat looks at me and meows. She begins her song, sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "The Farmer-Labor Train":

The Primary vote him in,

'cause the Fall race his platform will win

Kucinich is the man to lead us all!

Vote the Kucinich slate,

The Inaugural Ball our target date,

Kucinich is the man to lead us all!

Though it's just the two of us, I still applaud. It seems like an odd situation for a reporter and a senior campaign member to be in, and I can't help wonder what Flagg's counterparts in the Kerry and Edwards campaigns are like. They are probably male. They probably wear beige khakis and tucked-in collared shirts. They have probably worked in high-powered campaigns before. They probably do not exceed the speed limit and do not serenade reporters.

But the Kucinich campaign is not normal.

"This was really fun," I say on the car ride to the train station. "The New York primary, the votes are pretty much symbolic since the whole process is basically over by the time we have to vote. So I'm thinking that if my vote has to symbolize something, it might as well symbolize that I like people who sing songs. I'm voting for Kucinich."

"Well, that's wonderful," Flagg says. "I guess you could call this mission accomplished."