Politics & Power Quote by Dennis Kucinich

Kucinich doesn’t announce a platform here so much as a cosmology. By invoking the “Goddess of Peace,” he sidesteps the usual presidential grammar of policy, power, and pragmatism and opts for civic mythmaking: America as a moral actor, the presidency as a kind of priesthood, voters as congregants being asked to believe before they’re asked to budget. The line is deliberately maternal and enveloping - “encircle within her arms” - turning geopolitics into a family tableau where security is intimacy, not dominance.

That’s the intent: to reframe what “strength” means in a post-9/11 political culture that was rewarding martial certainty. Kucinich positions himself as the anti-war candidate without saying “I oppose war.” Instead, he offers a sanctified alternative language that makes militarism feel spiritually small, even childish. The subtext is a critique of American exceptionalism as conquest; his exceptionalism is protective and universal, extending care to “all the children of the world,” not just the national in-group.

Context does a lot of work. In the early 2000s Democratic field, Kucinich was a long-shot, and long-shots often speak in moral absolutes because they can’t credibly promise incremental wins. The almost New Age cadence reads, to supporters, as courageously uncorrupted; to skeptics, as unserious. Either way, it’s a strategic bet: if politics is theater, he’s refusing the war room set and walking onstage in a chapel.