Dennis Kucinich has been a city council member, a mayor, and a member of the U.S. Congress from 1997-2013. He has also run for governor of Ohio and twice for President of the United States. His new autobiographical book, which comes out on June 8, tells the story of his years on the Cleveland City Council, and as the city’s mayor. It is titled The Division of Light and Power. In December 2020, Kuchinich filed papers to possibly run again for mayor of Cleveland in the fall elections.
We spoke by telephone on June 4. (Editor's note: On June 15 we received a message from Dennis Kucinich that he had announced his campaign for mayor in the 2021 election.)
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Dennis Kucinich
Q: I’d like to start by asking about the title of your new book, The Division of Light and Power, because really the title is more than just about a power company, it’s about what goes on in government.
Dennis Kucinich: Literally, Cleveland’s municipal electric system was called the Division of Light and Power, and the effort to save it is one of the key themes of the book. But beyond that, we’re speaking of light in the sense of the light of truth, the light of justice. That is one of the themes as well.
And of course, power. In this book, it relates specifically to the interests of those trying to manipulate city government. As I say in the book, City Hall is “not just the dark stone temple on East 6th Street and Lakeside Avenue in Cleveland. City Hall was also in the boardrooms of the banks, of the utility monopolies, of the real estate combines, and in the places where the mob met.”
Q: The book starts with your story of being a young, idealistic member of the city council who beat the machine by simply knocking on doors, rather than using the old techniques of money and influence.
Kucinich: When I first started in politics, I was a copy boy at The Plain Dealer, and I got a call one night from somebody who wanted to run for city council. I put down the phone, and that led to a decision I made on the spot: I’m going to find out what this is about.
I’ve always been interested in public service, so I was twenty years old, entering into a city council race, and I lost that first race. The second time, I won. How did I do it? Door-to-door. I campaigned for two years, door-to-door, and it was the door-to-door campaign that connected me with people.
People will tell you what their concerns are if you go and meet them. The essence of democratic organizations is it has to be people-to-people. But what’s happened with the intervention of money, it’s changed all things. With Citizens United and some of the other decisions that allow for unlimited campaign funds, no one knows where the influence is coming from.
Q: Talk about turning the system on its head and being a different kind of candidate.
Kucinich: This struggle was at its core a fight to save Cleveland’s municipal electric system from a takeover by utility monopoly. In the book, I point out, right at the beginning, there were instances of corporate espionage, sabotage, price-fixing, interference with the operations of the electric system by the private utility. The private utility actually created blackouts of the public utility system, to build its case for taking it over.
There were some really dirty things that were going on, and I witnessed all this. And in the book, I share my journey and give the reader an opportunity to walk right with me from one experience to another, so they can see how this system works.
This isn’t just about Cleveland, Ohio. I will promise you that every big city in America and some smaller cities have a version of a power system that is very similar to Cleveland’s. I had the opportunity, as a councilman and a mayor, to tell a story about how the system actually works, specifically because I wasn’t part of the conventional way of doing things. We were really fighting for democratic control of a community and not to have it run behind the scenes for the sole benefit of corporate interests.
Q: What’s the difference between a publicly owned utility that’s accountable to the people versus these privatized systems where they say it’s going to save the city money but ends up not doing that.
Kucinich: Well, I’ll take a quote from Tom Johnson, who was mayor of Cleveland [from 1901 to 1909] and who’s dream it was to create a municipal electric system. He also created a municipal transportation system, a trolley system back then.
Johnson said, “I believe in municipal ownership of all public service facilities because if you do not own them, they will in time own you. They’ll corrupt your politics, rule your institutions, and finally, destroy your liberties.” He saw the essence of governance making sure people had control over their own destiny, over public services. And the privatization of public services takes away that control.
Not only that, but people pay for these facilities once through their rates or their taxes, and they end up paying for them a second time. The profits go away from the people and instead to monopolies, over which we don’t have any control.
Q: Throughout this book, you sort of pull back the cloth and show what’s underneath. Let’s talk about your run for President in 2004, because you did the same thing with the Iraq War and the machinations behind the U.S. entry into that war.
Kucinich: Because of my experience in Cleveland, because I understood how government and corporations lie openly and how they misled the people for their own narrow interests. I learned in Cleveland how to challenge an emerging and prevailing consensus.
In this case, the emerging consensus on a war because I was able to see through the lies that were being told that would lead us into war. That’s how I was able to organize 125 Democrats to vote against the Iraq War Resolution. But beyond that, there’s a point at which you can see the deception. You can see the lies, and you can see the consequences, too.
So, yes, what I learned in Cleveland equipped me to challenge exactly what was happening in the run-up to the war and in the conduct of the war.
Q: You’ve recently filed papers to run for mayor of Cleveland again. Talk about that decision and what you hope to do in that role.
Kucinich: What I did was file [the papers to establish] a committee so that I could raise money to do that. I have not filed as a candidate yet to run for the office. And that’s a decision that doesn’t have to be made for another couple of weeks. It’s a little bit premature for me to discuss that in an interview. I will say this: As a young person, many years ago, I chose a career in public service.
Q: If you were to run for mayor of Cleveland or some other office, what would you hope to do in that role?
Kucinich: I think the writing of The Division of Light and Power is a form of public service. It gives people some insight into, in a structured, detailed way, of the way government works, and then in the way it ought to be working.
This book took me forty years to write. I hope people get a chance to read it. It’s certain to spark a lot of open discussion about what our expectations should be for democratic governance. What is a democracy? Do we have one? And if we don’t, how can we get it back?