Nation: A Boy Mayor Has Problems

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Cleveland's top executive may be headed for early retirement

At 31, Cleveland's Dennis Kucinich is the youngest mayor of any big American city. Aggressive, bright and ambitious, he seemed likely to make good on his campaign promise to shake up city hall and provide more efficient government when he took office last November. Since then, Kucinich has indeed shaken up Cleveland. But, for the most part, the results have bordered on the disastrous. Last week, after he fired popular Police Chief Richard Hongisto, citizen groups began a recall movement that may send Kucinich into early retirement.

Despite his youth and choirboy looks, the 5-ft. 6-in. Kucinich (pronounced Koosin-itch) is a savvy veteran of Cleveland's bruising ward politics. The son of a truck driver, he grew up on the city's ethnic, working-class West Side (his father is Croatian, his mother Irish). At 23, he won a seat on the city council and six years later was elected clerk of courts, the city's second highest elective office. A maverick Democrat with a strong anti-Establishment bias, he has built his power base among poor and working-class voters. Says he: "They need someone to stand up and fight for them." Once he even invited Cleveland's civic leaders to breakfast with him at Tony's Diner, where he has eaten for years. His usual order: two bowls of Special K with bananas and a steak, which the waitress cuts up for him to save him time.

Witty and energetic, he has great appeal among the young; he keeps a ventriloquist's dummy in his baronial office to entertain visiting schoolchildren. Kucinich has a large collection of comic books and has seen Star Wars six times. He is a master at manipulating the media. On the night that he edged out the official Democratic candidate for mayor by only 2,900 votes of the 180,000 cast, Kucinich was in the newsroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he once worked as a copy boy. While photographers clicked their cameras, he sent the edited story of his victory by pneumatic tube to the composing room.

After becoming mayor, Kucinich charged about the city, barking orders and firing anyone who he thought was not doing his job correctly. When blizzards closed Cleveland's airport, Kucinich sacked the airport director and supervised the snow removal himself.

He soon appointed to high city offices some 40 zealous followers, about half of whom are younger than he is. They share his distrust and disdain for bureaucrats, but some of them are inexperienced. Director of Finance Joseph Tegreene, for example, is a 24-year-old political science graduate of Kenyon College who worked as a stockbroker for eight months; No. 2 slot in the department of Public Safety is held by Tonia Grdina, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Cleveland State University. The Kucinich appointees quickly became known as the City Hall Raiders. To their credit, the Raiders rooted out hundreds of unproductive bureaucrats, mostly middle managers. But many Clevelanders complain that some of the Raiders have proved to be ruthless and arrogant. Concedes Kucinich: "The criticism has some merit as it relates to the bureaucracy, but we treat the general public with respect."