Democrat Kucinich: long shot who keeps on running

By Andrea Hopkins

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich has just 1 percent support in the polls, six candidates ahead of him and next to no chance of becoming U.S. president. But don't tell him that.

A six-term anti-war congressman from Cleveland, Kucinich was the last Democrat standing against Sen. John Kerry in 2004 -- if only because he refused to quit. And he's convinced his second run for the presidential nomination will be more successful.

"I'm in this campaign to win," Kucinich said after an Ohio campaign stop. "People are looking for an alternative."

Voters looking for an alternative to mainstream U.S. politics will certainly find that in Kucinich, a 60-year-old vegan who survived homelessness as a child and a Mafia death threat early in his career to become a key figure in the growing anti-war movement.

During Monday night's CNN/YouTube Democratic debate, Kucinich wore the liberal label proudly.

"You notice what CNN did? They didn't put anybody to the left of me," Kucinich said, to audience laughter.

"I'm not sure it would be possible to find anybody," host Anderson Cooper shot back with a smile.

At every campaign stop, Kucinich reminds voters he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning -- not always a popular position during the 2004 election but one now shared by seven of 10 Americans.

"People are now seeing that I was right," he said during the Columbus campaign stop.

Considered the most liberal candidate in the presidential race, if not in Congress, Kucinich also supports single-payer health care, full funding of preschool through college, the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney and gay marriage. If elected, he would establish a Department of Peace.

While those positions might be more mainstream in Europe, Kucinich won just 1 percent support in a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll of Democrats, compared to 45 percent for Sen. Hillary Clinton and 30 percent for Sen. Barack Obama.

Former Sen. John Edwards, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Joe Biden also outpolled Kucinich in the crowded race, while Sen. Chris Dodd matched Kucinich's 1 percent support.

Still, analyst Alexander Lamis said Kucinich's dogged presence in the campaign more than 15 months before the November 2008 election and frank criticism of his opponents' platitudes has forced a higher level of debate.

"I'm sure he probably rankles some in the Democratic Party establishment, and ... the established press wants to put him in the 'out-of-it' category," said Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "But he's probably got a lot more support than Biden and Dodd. He's got a grass-roots network and somehow he gets a lot of visibility."

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