Kucinich Not Content to Just Drive Some Ideas in Presidential Race

WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Harper, a strikingly beautiful, 27-year-old, 6-feet-tall Englishwoman with flowing red hair, had been in America for only a few weeks when she visited Capitol Hill in 2005 for an eight-minute meeting on monetary policy with Dennis Kucinich, then 58, a wonkish, 5-foot-7, twice-divorced Democratic congressman from Ohio.

It was love at first sight.

Or rather, "it was soul recognition," as the smitten couple later described the lightening that struck them both.

"I knew that my life had been changed and that I had just met my husband," said Elizabeth.

And she sensed so strongly that Kucinich had been likewise affected that she quickly phoned her grandmother in England to report that she had just met a congressman and he had fallen for her.

A few weeks later, they got together again at Shirley MacLaine's house in Sante Fe. They talked all night. Romance blossomed. Within four months, they were married.

So is it really so improbable that Dennis Kucinich could become president?

"I see a great chance of him being elected. The country is at a point where it knows what it wants," said Elizabeth Kucinich, now 30. "Dennis is the people's candidate."

"The question is whether there is enough courage within the electorate" for supporters to ignore the naysayers and vote with their heads and hearts, she said.

More hardened observers say the sparkling green eyes of the candidate's wife are peering through rose-colored glasses.

"Kucinich has no chance to be the nominee," said political analyst Larry Sabato, summing up the conventional wisdom on the long-shot candidacy. "Even Democrats who agree with him on some issues have mainly decided to back more viable candidates."

A USA Today/Gallup Poll released last week showed Kucinich favored by 4 percent of Democrats nationwide, tied for fourth place with Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and leading Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had 1 percent apiece. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton led with 39 percent, followed by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama with 24 percent and former N.C. Sen. John Edwards with 15 percent.

"There is a role for candidates like Kucinich," said Sabato, author of "A More Perfect Constitution" and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "They often challenge the conventional wisdom and the other candidates and introduce different ideas into the process."

But the candidate himself is hardly accepting of such a bit part.

"I'm pulling good crowds in New Hampshire," he said in a brief interview at the fall meeting of the Democratic National Committee. "I've got a strong grass roots constituency. The people know I'm the one Democrat who has been consistent" in opposing the Iraq war, endorsing a single-payer, universal health care system, calling for "full employment," and demanding that the United States get out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)."

"I'm the real Democrat in the race," he declared.

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He was eldest of seven children born in 1946 into a struggling Catholic family in the ethnic goulash that is the West Side of Cleveland. His father was Croatian and drove a delivery truck. His mother was Irish and took care of the kids and the home. He was always the smallest boy in his classes. The family "rented, never owned," Kucinich recalls on campaign stops now. He had lived in 21 places, including a couple of times in the back seat of cars and for several months in an orphanage, by the time he reached high school. Then the oldest Kucinich son moved into an apartment on his own and worked as a caddy to pay his way to St. John Cantius, a private Catholic secondary school in a tough neighborhood. He was a third-string quarterback in high school and a star debater.

Working his way through Case Western Reserve University, he earned undergraduate and masters degrees in speech and communication in 1973. But the student was already a precocious politician. After losing a run for the Cleveland City Council at the age of 21, he was elected to the council two years later in 1969. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1972 and in 1974 but became clerk of Cleveland's Municipal Court in 1975. Two years later, he gained national attention as Cleveland's "Boy Mayor" — having been elected at the age of 31.

He served one tumultuous term.

Mayor Kucinich fired Cleveland's popular police chief live on the 6 o'clock news. He named a 24-year-old friend as the city's finance chief. Then he survived a recall election by 236 votes. But most disturbingly to the power structure, Kucinich refused to sell the city's electric company, Muny Light, to raise revenue to help meet the city's financial obligations. The Cleveland Trust Company called in municipal debts and forced the city into default.

About this time, the local mafia put out a contract on Kucinich. Afraid that the mayor was throttling even the illicit economy, they hired an out-of-state hit man.

Cleveland native Scott Raab recalled in Esquire last month how the effort to "whack the mayor at a Columbus Day parade" in 1978 failed mainly because Kucinich got sick and didn't show up. Then the hit was shifted to Tony's Diner, where Kucinich ate breakfast every morning and the hit man had a clean shot from a rooftop across 117th Street. But, at the last minute, the contract was canceled when the mob decided the "Boy Mayor" was so unpopular he would never be re-elected.

"Kucinich, meanwhile, on the advice of police, had long since begun wearing a bulletproof vest and kept a gun at home," Esquire reported.

The mob's political prognosticators were right.

When he sought re-election, Kucinich was soundly defeated in 1979 by Republican George Voinovich, now a U.S. senator from Ohio.

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When Elizabeth Harper entered Rep. Kucinich's office in 2005, she was with her new boss at the American Monetary Institute in New York City. She had grown up in the 1980s in the British village of North Ockendon in a home called Maytree Cottage. Her father ran a company that made fencing. Her mother was a New Age healer. Elizabeth and her younger sister, Verity, cared for stray animals.

By the time she visited Capitol Hill, she had earned a master's degree in conflict analysis from the University of Kent, worked with the needy in India and in Tanzania and corresponded with a death row inmate in Texas.

Kucinich, meanwhile, had worked as a local TV reporter in Cleveland before reviving his political career. After his refusal to sell Muny Light turned out to be a good deal for Cleveland consumers, he won what would be the first of six congressional races in 1996. He keeps close ties to the West Side — living in the same house he bought for $22,500 in 1971 and listing the addresses and phone numbers of all the bowling alleys in his district on his congressional Web site.

"I think one of his biggest strengths that his enemies underestimate is his intelligence," said Abe Zaiden, author of "Portraits of Power," a collection of essays about Ohio politicians.

"I once wrote a piece calling him a combination of Ralph Nader and George Wallace and George McGovern, depending on where he was giving a speech," said Zaiden, a longtime columnist with the Akron Beacon Journal and Cleveland Plain Dealer before his retirement. "He has an uncommon talent for spreading his appeal around."

Although she has been dismayed by journalistic fascination with the silver stud in her pierced tongue, the candidate's wife said she loves "being out with the people."

"I'm living out of a suitcase, on an airplane, in other people's houses on the campaign trail," she said in a telephone interview. "It's amazing for me to see, coming to America with fresh eyes."

The America following the presidential race through the televised debates knows Kucinich through a moderator, NBC-TV newsman Tim Russert, asking the candidate about an account in a book by MacLaine that Kucinich had seen a UFO while visiting her home in Washington state.

"I did," said Kucinich, adding "you have to keep in mind that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than, I think, approve of George Bush's presidency."

Kucinich and MacLaine have been friends since they met in Elaine's, a trendy Manhattan restaurant, shortly after Kucinich lost his re-election race for mayor of Cleveland. But Kucinich, although a vegan who doesn't eat meat or daily products, is less of a New Age politician than a traditionalist.

"Dennis is a true believer. Perhaps in his mind, he believes that he is the only true Democrat in the race. He is always talking about taking the party back to FDR," said David Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron. "But in fact, the Democratic Party has changed a bit since then."

Kucinich is to the left of the 2008 Democratic Party, said Cohen.

The candidate disagrees. At the DNC meeting, Kucinich told the party faithful that he best represents their values – following FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, and LBJ's Great Society. He unabashedly called the federal government the nation's "employer of last resort" and proposed a program like the Depression's WPA to create "full employment" and rebuild the infrastructure. He has sought impeachment for Vice President Dick Cheney and wants U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq quickly. He believes NAFTA has cost America "millions of jobs" and says he would pull out of such trade agreements if elected. He advocates a "universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care system" — what some opponents would call government-run, socialized medicine.

Elizabeth Kucinich — who hopes to have children someday — said she knew nothing of the political views of her husband-to-be when she first visited his office. So what did she see in him?

"Great integrity. Great strength. Courage. Clarity," she said. "An absolutely incredible human being."