
Dennis "the Menace" Kucinich (born 8 October 1946) was the Democratic Mayor of Cleveland from 14 November 1977 to 6 November 1979 (succeeding Ralph Perk and preceding George Voinovich) and a member of the US House of Representatives (D-OH 10) from 3 January 1997 to 3 January 2013 (succeeding Martin Hoke and preceding Mike Turner).
Biography[]
Dennis Kucinich was born in Cleveland, Ohio to a Croatian-American truck driver and an Irish-American mother, and he was elected to city council in 1969 at the age of 23 before failing in his 1972 bid for the US House of Representatives. He went on to be elected Mayor at the age of 31, and he became known for his abrasive, intemperate, and confrontational populist political style, leading to a disorderly and chaotic administration. He barely survived a recall vote just ten months into office and disappeared for five weeks, ostensibly to recover from a bleeding ulcer; during those five weeks, the Cleveland crime family planned to murder him for refusing to sell Municipal Light, but the Mafia called off their contract killer when the city fell into default in 1978. Cleveland's default made that city the first to do so since the Great Depression, and resulted in Kucinich's defeat and exit from executive office. Kucinich went on to experience downward mobility, losing races for several other offices before returning to the city council from 1983 to 1985; he later claimed to have met Hollywood actress Shirley MacLaine in a previous life, "seemingly confirming his critics' charges that he was a 'nut cake'," as the New York Times wrote in a 1993 article ranking Kucinich was the seventh-worst mayor in American history. Kucinich later mounted a political comeback and served in the US House of Representatives from 1997 to 2013, chairing the Progressive Democrats from 1999 to 2003. He introduced articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, unsuccessfully advocated for a public option component for Obamacare, and came to support abortion rights and the ending of abstinence-only sex education after initially being a staunchly anti-abortion politician. He failed in his 2004 and 2008 bids for the presidency, during which he advocated for single-payer healthcare and the establishment of a "Department of Peace".