Democrat Kucinich quits White House race (AP via Yahoo! News)

I had heard that one Democrat was mounting a challenge to Kucinich’s House seat a while back. Now there’s four, and as much as I wanted Kucinich to repeat his performance from 2004 (staying in the race until it was mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination), I can’t blame him for pulling out like this. The mainstream media silencing him at every turn (pulling him from debates being only the latest example of this) was making it impossible for him to gain any real momentum, and it wasn’t like he had much of a chance of winning the nomination from the onset anyway. Yes, I wanted him to stay in as long as possible, but the man has to put food on his table, and I can’t fault him for focusing his energies on retaining his House seat in this climate. Still, the fact that all of these challengers would suddenly pop up strikes me as dirty politics, and I’m fairly convinced that someone in the Democratic Party is likely behind this.

As if this isn’t bad enough, Kucinich saying that he won’t endorse another candidate, when he’d previously given a tacit endorsement to Obama by telling his Iowa caucusers to pick Obama as a second choice, is rather chilling. The only reason I can see for Kucinich to do this is that he believes, as so many others do at this point, that Clinton is going to win the nomination for the Democrats. I still can’t say that I believe Obama to be the true progressive that so many say he is — I think that’s the same kind of wishful thinking that made Howard "balanced budget hawk and lifetime A ranking from the NRA" Dean the so-called big name progressive of 2004 — but I’d rather have him as the Democratic candidate by a long shot. I know the old saying goes "better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know," but in the case of the Clintons I’d just rather they disappear entirely from the face of American politics.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that a couple of weeks ago, knowing full well that Kucinich stood next to no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, I signed the Draft Nader petition to try to get Nader into the Green Party primaries. It’s looking more and more like the Green nomination is Cynthia McKinney’s to lose if Nader doesn’t enter, and even though I’d vote for McKinney in a heartbeat if the next best alternative out there is Clinton, I still have a lingering distrust for McKinney, and I don’t think she’s the person who the Green Party should be putting out there as the face of its principles. This whole campaign just seems to be headed straight down the crapper, and it’s making it all the more painful for me to realize that this is the last presidential campaign I’ll be too young to run in. Do I have to fix everything around here?