Cleveland is the epitome of the rust belt; desperately poor, incredibly loyal to the sports teams, burgeoning arts scene, great music scene and so on. all the money is in the suburbs, all the the jobs are in mexico and overseas but the people are still here. they are definitely still here and for the remainder of the campaign. parts of them are me, parts of me are them. it's funny to acclimate yourself to a city. to know it gradually through its twisting arterial streets, beating neighborhoods, Ohio City, Tremont, and the industrial guts of the East Side. it's a strange but pleasing slow knowledge which comes from making wrong turns, long trips on the bus and walks around downtown.

going out and about in Cleveland, like josef and i did on saturday, is probably the starkest reminder of why i'm here working for dennis. saturday night, we went to coventry village, and hung out in a wine bar, drank a glass of white wine with some friends we met last weekend, and then attempted to head home. as we stood at the RTA (Cleveland metro) station around 1:30am, proud holders of tickets 'good until 3am' the realization dawned on us, that while the tickets may have been good until 3, that didn't preclude the trains from stopping at midnight. so, after ruling out hitching, we decided to walk at least part of the 12 miles which separated us from home. we walked for a long, long time, down Carnegie ave, aware the further we walked, the more abandoned warehouses and boarded up homes there were. as both of us we used to cities, we traveled on, figuring we'd walk until fortune favored us with a bus. well, no bus came and the tired faces of old apartment buildings and shut-down businesses began to crumble even further.

i was reluctant to admit i was nervous. i grew up in a city, i'm a big guy who can handle himself okay, i should be able to walk a ways in the dark. in the dark. eventually, josef and i decided to flag down a cab. the driver stopped for us after about fifteen feet of hesitation and let us get in. when we told him how far we were planning to walk, and where through, he let us know we were probably in the worst possible neighborhood to be unfamiliar with at night. 'drug dealer prostitution central,' he called it. part of me always rails against such proclamations, 'whaddaya mean WORST neighborhood? you sure you don't just mean most-BLACK neighborhood or most POOR?' because in my experience, that's what most people usually mean. but, the part of me that was glad for a ride home in the earliest hours of the morning quelled my initial response. i don't think the driver really meant anything, his concern was more for two people who were clearly in a fish-out-of-water situation.

after we got home, i thought about it some more. it's no secret poor folks live in the worst areas of major cities. let me be absolutely clear though; these places are not terrible because poor folks live in them. it has little to do with the quality or character of the people there but it has everything to do with the services provided, the businesses who stay or leave, the landlords who either keep up places or don't, and the jobs which are there and especially the jobs which AREN'T there. i've seen it all my life in Albany, and i'm seeing it again in Cleveland Cleveland. and i'm sure as much as i'm tired of observing these situations, the people who have to live them every single day of their lives are furious and exhausted by them.

i think a Kucinich Administration could do a lot to change the status quo here. i'm hoping,with him in office, we can take steps to having inner-city neighborhoods where the services are equal, the opportunities real, and the fear and reality of street crime is reduced to the meanest ghost. yeah, yeah, i know; pipe dreams. but you better be sure that i wouldn't be here, that all of us interns wouldn't be here unless we thought Dennis could make a difference, alleviate some of the suffering of our nation and maybe even the world. i don't really have faith in him per se as much as i doggedly accept his possibility he offers the country. we still need all the help we can though. so, please, check us out.

howdy,


i know it's nearly thursday but, welcome back to tuesdays with harrison. i know approximately zero html so don't expect no fancy links or nothin from me unlike asher's extremely well done post.

you know how in baseball they have the "dog days of summer"? well, the analogy lines up for the time we've been spending at the office recently. with our intern staff down by three and the real work of the campaign ahead of us, we've been logging 14 and 16 hour days. marathons in squeaky office chairs with tired wrists and bleary eyes. it's been fun though, there's a sort of primal satisfaction that comes with early days and long night, especially when you are making serious progress. i don't think anyone has described our office yet, so let me paint the picture for you:

we call it the pit. actually, since the a/c now works, that name really doesn't match up as well, but the pit it remains. we have four large office desks along the right side of the wall. on three of these sit a couple of IBM/Dells computers with flatscreen monitors and cpus which still have disk drives. there's a motley assortment of beat up squeaky chairs, some of which are surprisingly comfortable, some of which not-so-surprisingly lean back way too far when you sit in them.

each desk has started to inherit the personality of who sits there. mine has a picture of dennis taped to the top with red eyes colored in with the caption reading "flame of justice ----->" speakers and paper, paper everywhere. you know what? i spend enough time in the office. i think i'm done writing about the office (LIES!)

anyway, i've been working on the good ole
dial for dennis project like a madman. it's finally starting to come together, we've got numbers out to a bunch of volunteers so we'll see how it goes. students for kucinich is coming along real nicely and i'm pretty excited about the scope of that project. today, all of us went crazy around 9 o'clock and started laughing into the phone for the benefit of hal, who we thought was upstairs. it turned into singing and pretty soon we had a 4-part arrangement of 'breakfast at tiffany's' going before we stopped. laughing about how hal was probably wondering what the hell was going on, we turned back to our work as he walked in the back door.

howdy folks,

welcome to the inaugural post of the Students for Kucinich Blog. my name is Harrison and i work as an intern at the National Campaign Office in Cleveland, Ohio with roughly 8 other interns, and a mixture of volunteers and paid staff. we're gonna each take a day (my day is obviously tuesday) and let everyone know just what we're up to here @ Dennis Central. hopefully, we'll also be able to network with other Kucinich supporters and broaden his support around the country.

my story:
i turned down a Hillary Clinton staff position with $2000 per-month, full health and dental and a few other perks for a $400 per month stipend where i got housing, working for Dennis. why? he's: anti-war, pro universal health care, pro criminal justice reform, pro green energy development and expansion, and trust in a person who has consistently and unequivocally stood up for what i believe to be the benefit of poor, working and middle class americans time and time again regardless of how damaging it may have been politically. very few other politicians can make that claim on the national level. with this in mind in the beginning of August, i prepared to leave for Cleveland.

i arrived in Cleveland by car roughly a week ago, give or take a couple hours, and found my way to the office where i met Chaz and Corey, two punkrock activists from Wisconsin. they helped me carry my stuff upstairs to my very own apartment right across from the office, in a building somewhat situated on top of a gigantic, derelict cinema with the name, VARIETY splashed across the side of the marquee in faded red letters. it felt good to move in and prepare to settle down.

i was soon swept in the endless cyclone that is a political campaign , as i attended a kucinich meet-up with all the other interns and Dave Kelley (an adviser to the campaign), went out to dinner and finally, exhausted, i unpacked my stuff with the help of stacey and asher (we all live in the same building; Real World Kucinich take 1) and was asleep by 11:30.

from then on it's been fairly non-stop. i got into the thick of things the next day and have been heading up the House Party project with John and the Dial4Dennis project with Evan, both major fund-raisers for the campaign. the interns have all started to click with each other and the training wheels on the campaign are off. we just picked up Josef, our newest intern, from the airport yesterday where i promptly got us lost by refusing to listen to John by driving onto the wrong expressway. however, he did make it here safely and we promptly went out to a diner where he hatched the idea for this blog. or, if it wasn't Josef, i apologize, but it wraps the story up a bit nicer don't you think? also, today we were interviewed by Aussie t.v. crew for part of a documentary on what it takes to elect and American president. look for yours truly, John, Chaz, and Josef coming to Australian theaters sometime soon.

signing off,
H