Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

Kucinich was the only candidate who treated college students like grownups and embraced idealistic policies like a Department of Peace. While other campaigns tried to win over “youth” by passing out T-shirts with cutesy names (“Deanie Babies” and “Liebermaniacs”) or giving away free hot dogs, Kucinich went the other way. At the University of New Hampshire in Durham, he refused to dumb down his speech and quoted the likes of Jung, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Thomas Berry, and the humanist sociologist Morris Berman. In a preview of issues that would become extremely popular among Democrats years later, he said his campaign was about changing the priorities of the country away from military spending and foreign intervention, and toward greater investment in education and health care. He sat down and opened up the floor to discussion, and the “stump speech” became a sit-in, where people talked about all sorts of things, including their personal lives, depression, drugs, etc. Kucinich ultimately got a standing ovation (as both he and Gephardt had at the AFL-CIO conference). Afterward, though, few students said they would even consider voting for him. “[Kucinich is] everything that I personally would want in a President,” a grad student named David Wilmes told me. “But… it’s going to have to be someone like Kerry or Edwards.” Why? “Well,” he said. “It’s probably going to have to be someone who’s tall.” I told Kucinich about this exchange. He sighed and said that until people learned t...