Muslims For Kucinich

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Dennis Kucinich was expounding on his proposals for a hasty exit from Iraq and a 15 percent cut in defense spending when a member of Central Ohioans for Peace asked about something far deeper.

With the 57-year-old Cleveland congressman headed for a fund-raiser sponsored by the Natural Law Party, which espouses the pantheistic message of oneness and unity, the skeptical peace activist asked, "I wonder if you feel sure of the dangers others see in aligning yourself with them?"

Kucinich answered by asking everyone to take a dollar bill out of their pocket and to look closely at the eye at the apex of the pyramid on the Great Seal.

"Here on the Great Seal of the United States we see an expression of spiritual principles," Kucinich said. "So I think what we are here to do is bring spiritual principles into the material world."

Kucinich, running last in most polling of the nine Democrats seeking the nomination to take on President Bush next November, may also be the quirkiest and least understood.

His hair is typically mussed. He appears to be swimming in his suits, perhaps because his vegan diet keeps him rail thin. And his ears seem a bit too large for his boyish face. It is hardly the look of political polish that personal wealth has bought some of the other contenders for the seat he seeks.

He is also to the left of mainstream.

He has a plan that could bring the troops home by New Year's if only he were president. He has introduced legislation to repeal the Patriot Act.

He also would repeal tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for a free college education for everyone. As his first act in office, he said, he would abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement and get the United States out of the World Trade Organization.

"I've been all over the country and seen grass growing in what used to be parking lots of major industries that made steel, and bicycles and washing machines," he told a Ohio State University assembly.

Kucinich said he would sign treaties banning chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and would create a Department of Peace with a Cabinet-level secretary devoted to resolving conflicts at home and abroad.

"As president of the United States, I would lead the nation in rejoining the world," Kucinich said. He described his campaign as "a movement of empowerment."

"I have a holistic vision where no nation dominates another, where we live cooperatively," he said.

There are few people, even in his own town and state, who think Kucinich has a shot at the White House. Polls show him with between 1 percent and 3 percent of the vote.

"Is he electable?" said Ohio State University political science professor Herb Weisberg. "Not unless he's away from Washington, D.C., on a day that a nuclear attack wipes out everyone else in government -- and even then he would be carrying the wrong message to win."

And yet Kucinich trudges on, feeling ignored by the press but supremely confident that the clarity of his message will get out and ultimately sweep him into office.

"As we get closer to the election, and as people learn about the campaign, it is inevitable that our campaign starts to rise because I think people continue to look for alternatives," Kucinich said in an interview.

"A lot of people don't know I am running yet," he said. "I expect that the election will start to turn, and the fact that the expectations of our campaign were expected to be minimal will end up actually being helpful. We'll be the surprise of the 2004 season."

Kucinich says this without a hint of doubt, and it is unclear whether he has any.

This may be because he has not hired the usual cadre of political professionals that flock to presidential candidates and surrounds himself instead with believers.

Dot Maver, his national campaign manager, is a peace activist from Vermont. One of Kucinich's top Ohio aides said he got involved because the congressman made a midnight trip back to Cleveland to stand up for him at his church confirmation.

Kucinich is a self-made politician of a different order.

The oldest of seven children whose truck-driving father never had much money, Kucinich likes to tell people that he lived in 21 different apartments and "a few cars" during his childhood. That endowed him with tenacity and drive. He put himself through college and was elected to the Cleveland City Council shortly thereafter.

Kucinich was 31 when voters elevated him to the mayor's office in 1977. The city was in deep financial trouble, and when he refused to sell the municipal power plant as the banks had demanded, they foreclosed, the city went into bankruptcy and by 1979 Kucinich was disgraced and unemployed.

That began his search for meaning and purpose. Campaign communications adviser Dale Butland described it as Kucinich's "forty days in the wilderness," even though the congressman said he wandered around the country for nearly four years.

It was on that journey that Kucinich met actress Shirley MacLaine, from whom he borrowed a reported $20,000 that still shows up as unpaid on his congressional financial disclosure report. He also met other spiritualists, vegans and new-age crusaders who remain among his core supporters.

One of them was Chris Griscom, who operates the Nizhoni School in New Mexico. Kucinich donated $3,000 in speaking fees earned in 2002 to that school, which according to its Web site teaches students among other things, that they are reincarnated and chose their parents.

By the early 1990s, Kucinich was ready to re-enter politics. By then the wisdom of preserving public ownership of the local power company had been revived. Instead of being viewed as the mayor who brought the city to financial ruin, Kucinich now was regarded as the person who kept low-cost power available to the townsfolk.

After two years in the state Senate, Kucinich was elected to Congress, narrowly defeating Republican incumbent Martin Hoke in a hugely Democratic district.

Kucinich is well-liked by almost all who know him, Democrats and Republicans. They stress that he has mellowed considerably from the fiery, confrontational days when he was the young mayor of Cleveland presiding over its bankruptcy.

State Rep. Jim Trakas, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Republican Party, said Kucinich remains locally popular despite the views he espouses on the campaign trail, and there's almost no chance of Republicans recapturing his House seat.

"The Department of Peace stuff, people snicker at," Trakas said. "But people like him."

But Jim Ruvolo, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said he doesn't think Kucinich's local popularity will translate well statewide in his presidential quest.

"Ohioans have trouble thinking of him as a final tier candidate," he said.

Others see him as much more.

At the $50,000 Natural Law Party fund-raiser dubbed the "national peace summit," John Hagelin, the party's 2000 presidential nominee, said he sees Kucinich leading the country and the world to "a new civilization of unity consciousness, a civilization of peace."

"Dennis Kucinich is the messenger of this transformation," Hagelin said. "He can spark the conflagration, the grass-roots brush fire that will sweep civilization into a new phase."

Kucinich doesn't shy away from these spiritual connections. Instead he weaves them into his remarks wherever he goes.

Asked at one point if he is still a practicing Catholic after changing his position to support a woman's right to abortion, Kucinich stopped dead in his tracks.

"Yes," he said. "But I practice all religions."

Speaking to the peace activists, he quoted biblical passages. At a Ramadan dinner of Arab Americans, he quoted from the Quran. And at the Natural Law Party event in the evening, he was fluent in the language of unity.

"It's time for us to affirm unity with the conduct of governance," he said. "My presidency will be about affirming unity."