Dennis Kucinich AFL-CIO Town Hall Meeting in Columbus

Dennis Kucinich AFL-CIO town hall meeting in Columbus

Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the son of a Teamster truck driver and the oldest child in a paycheck-to-paycheck family of seven children, brought his life's experiences and his legislative record to an AFL-CIO town hall meeting on July 21st in Columbus (OH) and told his union brothers and sisters, "This campaign is about jobs. It's about jobs. And it's about jobs."

"It's the workers of this country who are going to determine who the president is going to be," the Cleveland Congressman told the cheering crowd. And that next President, he said, must be committed to creating new jobs, making health care available to all Americans, securing workers' rights and pension rights, and improving education for the next generation of American workers.

Introduced as "Ohio's favorite son," Kucinich, the only card-carrying union member in the Democratic field, had the audience on its feet several times. He vowed to cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has resulted in the out-sourcing of millions of American jobs. He promised a national, not-for-profit health insurance system that would cover all Americans. He pledged that the Justice Department and the Labor Department would enforce workers' rights, especially the right to organize.

His deep and sincere commitment to those issues and his legislative record separate him from the other Democratic candidates, Kucinich said.

"Do you think I could stand up here and talk like this if I was owned by Wall Street," Kucinich asked? "I'm someone who can not be bought. I'm someone who can not be bossed. I'm someone who can not be intimidated."

On health care, he said the other candidates "get too much money from the insurance companies, they can't break the hold." On foreign trade, other candidates are proposing to "fix" trade agreements, instead of scrapping them, and those promises are "weasel-wording" what they really plan to do: "nothing."

In a poignant story taken from his early years as a newspaper copyboy in Cleveland, Kucinich's eyes welled with tears, as did many in the audience, when he told of going to the homes of families to pick up photographs of their children who had died in the war in Vietnam. In vivid, emotional detail, he described their modest, working-class homes "and their hands…rough hands…like they had been working their whole lives…and just barely making it." He used the story to illustrate the personal impact that wars on the other side of the world have on families in Ohio and across the country. The war in Iraq, he said, must be brought to an end and America's service men and women must be brought home as soon as possible.

"You're looking at the only candidate to vote against the war and all of the appropriations" since, Kucinich said.

He added, "Ohio has the chance to be heard and change the election." As an Ohioan, "one of you," Kucinich said, "I'll never forget where I came from."

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