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Thursday, January 22, 2004

Singled Out For Primaries

By John Brennan
Mountain View Telegraph
    I don't really know much about Dennis Kucinich, but somebody apparently thinks I'm dying to hear all about him.
    I keep getting e-mails about Kucinich's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. They trumpet what Kucinich has done in the past, what he just did yesterday, what he plans to do tomorrow and what he may be thinking of doing next week.
    No offense to Mr. Kucinich, but this definitely falls into the category of more information than I need.
    What bewilders me, though, is how the Kucinich bandwagon got on to me— and why nobody else from the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls did.
    I don't get e-mails telling me what Howard Dean had for breakfast, or how far John Kerry jogged yesterday. I don't get reminders of how many medals Wesley Clark has won, or how many primaries Dick Gephardt has lost.
    All I get is stuff from Kucinich, who's hardly at the head of the pack in this primary campaign. You'd think I'd be getting barraged with e-mails from the front-runners with the big campaign war chests. The ones who are running all the TV commercials.
    Dean, Clark and John Edwards, in particular, are on TV more often than Tom Brokaw. Have you ever seen a Dennis Kucinich commercial?
    At least "my candidate"— I call him that because we seem to have an online relationship going, one-sided as it may be— got 39 votes in the Iowa caucus (according to unofficial figures). That placed him a solid fifth in a field of 10, just ahead of somebody named "Uncommitted."
    So as unlikely a nominee as my buddy Dennis seems to be, I suppose I should be thankful my e-mail box is not full of urgent messages from Joe Lieberman, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton, who among them managed to grab exactly no votes in Iowa. Nobody wants to be on the losing side.
    I wouldn't mind seeing what Sharpton's e-mails have to say, though. I'm guessing the Rev. Sharpton's messages would probably have the greatest entertainment value of all the candidates.
    But I haven't heard from him, or any of the others, so it looks like me and Kucinich.
    I've got to hand it to old Dennis, though, for finding me and being thoughtful enough to send me his messages. And I'm surprised no one else has, because I'm clearly not that hard to find.
    Between the time I turn off my computer at night and turn it back on the next morning, I'd say I get an average of 50 e-mails— maybe 10 percent of which are from anyone I know or want to hear from. Over a weekend the number usually approaches 200.
    Besides information on Kucinich, the senders of these messages believe I need cheap prescription drugs including Viagra, a bogus university diploma, a date, a new mortgage at an unprecedentedly low interest rate, a vacation to Italy, an e-mail mailing list with millions of addresses, printer cartridges and ink, free pay-per-view movies and online gambling, among many other things. Not to mention the ones I can't mention in a family newspaper.
    Come to think of it, the Kucinich e-mails are probably among the least offensive of them all. So maybe I'll pull for him.
    I wonder what his position is on spam?
    John Brennan can be reached by phone at 823-7106 or by e-mail at jbrennan@mvtelegraph.com.