2/15/2004

From the Post: Kucinich, the longest of long-shot candidates, was on a two-day campaign swing through California. But Friday night, this neighborhood marked the beginning of a new mission. He was launching his 'Other America Tour' here, an effort, he said, to spotlight the poorest, most neglected neighborhoods in the country. Sunnydale, a square mile of row after row of brick barracks-like buildings where nearly half the families earn less than $15,000 a year, is as poor and neglected as San Francisco gets. People who have lived in the city for decades -- in the parts where two-bedroom fixer-upper houses bottom out at $500,000 -- often confess they have never seen Sunnydale, and are not even sure how to get there. 'One consequence of poverty is being invisible,' Kucinich said, echoing the words of Michael Harrington's 1962 book, 'The Other America,' which helped launch the war on poverty. 'Another is drugs. Another is violence. I've said before that poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. We need to disarm it.' "I think it takes a lot of courage to do what he is doing," said Damon Garrison, an urban outreach counselor in the neighborhood who volunteered to work on Kucinich's campaign. "What he talks about, we want a president to talk about. He has the opportunity to influence the discussions going on in this campaign." ...This Other America Tour, [Kucinich] said, will be a big part of his travels throughout the country in the next several months. "Wherever I go," he said solemnly, "I'll go to these places where no one goes."

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