Giuliani’s "Kucinich-Size" Crowds Disappoint In New Hampshire (NBC News via huffingtonpost.com)

The Huffington Post, as usual, chose their own headline for the story, and much like the Drudge Report before them, they picked a headline that targeted the HuffPo base and framed the meat of the story in the best terms possible for their goals, mainly to assist the mainstream Democratic candidates towards next year’s Presidential elections. (Also note the unflattering photo of Giuliani they use in the story; as much as I dislike Giuliani, I don’t think it’s fair of HuffPo to do that.) Mind you, in just the short excerpt of the story featured in the link above, HuffPo had another way to frame the story, comparing the size of Giuliani’s crowd to the size of the crowd Ron Paul garnered. That comparison would have worked just as well to slam Giuliani, plus it would have stuck it to another Republican, but instead HuffPo went with the Kucinich slam.

I’ve written before about how upset I am that HuffPo has made itself a shout box for the centrists who continue to stink up the Democratic Party, paying a small amount of lip service to Obama but otherwise playing the same "Clinton doesn’t represent us but don’t you dare vote Green" game that the Democrats played last time with John Kerry. It simply boggles the mind that there are so many on the so-called left here in America who are pushing hard to make Ron Paul an alternative to Clinton simply because he opposes the war, given that he also opposes pretty much everything the Democratic Party has traditionally stood for. I’m not saying that the war isn’t an important issue, but it’s almost as if Democrats are willing to throw away their very identity in order to try to spite Clinton in some sick, twisted way.

What has made this situation all the more maddening for me in recent weeks has been the sudden surge of Mike Huckabee in polls, both in the early primary/caucus states and in the nation as a whole. Huckabee’s rise in the polls doesn’t particularly surprise me, because he represents the values that the religious right so desperately want to keep in the White House. We can argue Huckabee’s electability later — I think he’s far more electable than anyone in the mainstream media has argued — but the point I am trying to make is that Mike Huckabee is living proof that a party can play to its traditional values instead of running to the centre and create a viable candidate. Huckabee’s example should have all true Democrats rushing to put their money into the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, and yet both of them continue to be treated as "joke" candidates, not only by the mainstream media but by the Democratic Party establishment itself.

I’m pretty much resigned to voting for the Green Party candidate next year and taking whatever abuse people want to give me for it. That’s not my primary concern right now, though. Right now I want nothing more than to take Dennis Kucinich softly by the shoulders, give him a warm smile, and then shake the heck out of him and yell "Why on earth are you still a Democrat?" I understand Kucinich’s historical ties to the party and his desire to work within the party to try to transform it, but I don’t think at this point that any reasonable person can expect that the big money centrists that have so thoroughly ruined the Democratic Party will be taking off any time soon. More than ever, 2008 needs to be the year that the Green Party establishes itself as a viable alternative for true progressives, and we start to chip away at the two-party hegemony that is so clearly leading this nation right down the crapper.