Ames Progressive

While Iowa was still the epicenter of the 2008 presidential race, Dennis Kucinich was excluded from two significant campaign events here. The first was the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, the Iowa Democratic Party’s important early testing space for the Democratic candidates. On Democracy Now! Kucinich attributed his exclusion from the dinner to “an attempt to rig the presidential election, using the Iowa Democratic Party as an accomplice.”

A few months later, Kucinich was one of two candidates not to be invited to participate in The Des Moines Register’s presidential debate (the other was the beleaguered and currently bed-ridden (but badass!) Mike Gravel). The Register, which eventually endorsed Hillary “Of Course” Clinton, stated that Kucinich had not been invited to the debate on the grounds that he did not have “an office and a full-time paid staff in Iowa,” which were criteria for inclusion in the debate.

Though major Iowa venues were unkind to Kucinich’s campaign, the most focused and persistent media exclusion was yet to come. Kucinich was initially invited by MSNBC to participate in their January 15 debate in Nevada (short “a”) but was dis-invited after the New Hampshire primary, when the network changed the qualifying criteria to include only candidates who had finished in the top three in either Iowa or New Hampshire.

Kucinich responded to the network’s decision by issuing a complaint in a Nevada district court requesting an emergency Temporary Restraining Order against NBC Universal. The judge in the case granted Kucinich’s request and ruled that, unless Kucinich was dis-dis-invited, the debate must be cancelled. But NBC Universal appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court and won their appeal just hours before the debate began.

On Friday, January 25, Kucinich officially withdrew from the presidential race. When he was asked about his motivation to abandon his campaign he admitted that “after being excluded from the debates [January 23] I found that I couldn’t get into the one in L.A.” All across this country, from Iowa to Nevada to California, he was actively prevented from participating in the presidential debates; that is without question. But another question, relevant to the future of American democracy, remains: did the media exclude Dennis Kucinich because the American people were not interested in him or were the American people uninterested in Dennis Kucinich because he was excluded by the media?