Forget Dennis Kucinich

Dennis Kucinich's 16-year stint in Congress is about to end, and Alex Koppelman, for one, does not care. "Liberals lost one of their favorite elected officials, and the press lost one of its favorite sources of comic relief," he writes for the New Yorker. "But Congress did not lose a leader."

In those 16 years, just four bills Kucinich was an original sponsor of became law—and two of them named post offices in Cleveland. "He’s one of those legislators who becomes a favorite of the base—this happens on both sides; look at Michele Bachmann—by talking a lot while doing very little," Koppelman says. "Liberals may miss him, briefly, but they’ll forget him soon enough. After all, he left nothing to remember him by." (More Dennis Kucinich stories.)