The Chris Moeller Archives

Home on a Friday evening?

Fire up the colortinis. This YouTube clip has it all.

The year and the attitude are 1978. Dennis Kucinich, then-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio and at 32, the youngest mayor of a major city in the United States, is on the Tomorrow Show on NBC with the late, great Tom Snyder, and he has just survived a recall election by the slimmest of margins. As Cleveland's mayor from 1977 to '79, Kucinich refused to sell off the city's publicly-owned electric utility to a corporate entity, causing the mafia to put out a hit on him, and forcing the city into default after the Cleveland Trust company required that all city debts be paid in full in the wake of his refusal.

The clip features a courageous politician-- a man who is still an important political figure-- and one of television's most-engaging personalities as the pair dine at a Cleveland restaurant the morning following the election. It's a captivating time capsule as broadcast television and a great civics lesson.

As a footnote to Kucinich's tumultuous mayoral tenure in what Snyder calls "one of America's great eastern cities," the Cleveland city council honored Dennis in 1998 for having the "courage and foresight" to keep the utility under public ownership, a move that saved the city an estimated $195 million between 1985 and 1995.

posted by CM @ 7:07 PM