Detroit — The room is unremarkable, the kind of room Dennis Kucinich often finds himself in, walls of cinderblock painted white, water-stained Rorschach acoustic tiles, and bad lighting. The room at the University of Detroit Mercy is small for a lecture hall, with uncomfortable seats, perhaps 120 of them occupied, enough vocal power to rival the music when the short man with a large personality and rumpled hair rose to the stage. The reaction is loud and adoring and typical of the kind Kucinich receives. In a few minutes, he will have them standing and hollering and clapping madly.
"If you love him, you really love him," more than one supporter said.
The congressman and former mayor of Cleveland has the fewest delegates, two, of any Democratic presidential candidate, fewer than some who have already dropped out of the race. Reporters do not travel with him. His campaign stops attract nominal media attention. His audiences can be small. By almost any measure, he is running last.
But while Carol Moseley Braun, Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman have quit, Kucinich seems committed to his long-shot, low-budget candidacy. His campaign has raised $5 million, he said, and expects to receive about $4 million in matching funds from the Federal Election Commission.
"You have to understand the way I look at the world," he said later in an interview with Newsday. "Some people have said I have a zen-like focus. I know what I'm working to achieve here ... I don't go to the newspapers to check out who I am.
"I've always had the capacity, ever since I was a child," he said, "to see that there was always another scenario out there ... For me, it was a miracle to own a home, to go to college, to get elected mayor. People have always said things are impossible. My whole life, people have been saying this is the way the world is. I've always seen something else ... It's vision. And vision has enormous power."
"Am I a long shot? Yes, of course," he told a group of his supporters. "I understand that. But there are a lot of long shots in this country. And long shots win."
Kucinich, 57, has studied the work of the late David Bohm, a theoretical physicist and philosopher who, among other things, pondered the relationship between language and reality. He suggested that because all objects are in a state of flux, there are no such things as nouns, just verbs. And that is Kucinich, always trying to be a verb, resisting the noun, ignoring the adjectives.
On the eve of Saturday's Michigan caucus, Kucinich worked perhaps harder than any candidate in the state, riding 380 miles in a Dodge Grand Caravan, making eight stops in 12 hours. Most in the field concentrated on Detroit or skipped Michigan entirely, conceding the state to Sen. John Kerry.
Kucinich hired a private jet to fly him to Kalamazoo, Mich., on Friday morning, from Spokane, Wash., where he campaigned Thursday night, because weather grounded commercial flights out of Spokane. He arrived at his first stop, the People's Church, an hour late with only a few hours of sleep. He drove more than an hour north and west to Muskegon to speak at a community college, then another long drive to Greenville, to the Electrolux refrigerator factory, which is scheduled to be closed within two years.
To burly men cradling cigarettes and plastic foam cups, he pledged to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement, and dismantle the World Trade Organization.
He tells elderly church ladies, head-shaved teenage girls, and old men who look like rumpled professors the same things: That he wants to immediately end the occupation of Iraq, create nonprofit health care for all Americans, provide free, universal pre-kindergarten, and a free college education to anyone who wants one. That he wants to be president of the United States, that he is different, he can make changes, he is not like the other candidates. To prove it, he extends his arms away from his sides and slowly rotates 360 degrees on the stage at the University of Detroit Mercy.
"No strings!"
The crowd rises and cheers. Kucinich, is just warming up.
His elderly constituents in Cleveland, in order to save money on prescription drugs, he says, "ride the bus across the border to Canada, buy their medicine, have lunch, go to the casinos, and they still save money!"
More laughter and cheers.
"If President Bush wants to find weapons of mass destruction, I'll take him on a tour of any big city."
"Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction!"
"Let me tell how you I feel!"
He brings down the house.
"That happens everywhere," he said later. "In the past year, we've built a true national organization."
He likened the election to a movement, and he wants to be the catalyst. He insisted he campaigns to win, that he is not here just to stir the debate or enjoy the platform. For his supporters, his candidacy is a matter of principle, not his odds of winning.
"If I hear one more person who says he can't win," said Mares Hirchert, a campaign volunteer from Hartland, Mich. "I'm voting for him because of what he stands for ... we're going to follow him and we're not going to pay attention to polls."
Kucinich also feels the horse-race aspect of politics is overdone.
"Right now, the thinking is, ‘anybody but Bush,"' he said. "But we have to watch that because there's no thought there. As long as there's a horse race, no one has to talk about what they stand for. What a break for politicians who never want to take a stand, and be all things to all people. We need to move this debate. Right now, there's no debate."
Kucinich said he was a long shot to win Cleveland's mayoral election in 1977 when, at 31, he became the youngest mayor of a major city. He said he was a long shot to play quarterback in high school. As a freshman he stood less than 5 feet - he's now 5-7 - and weighed less than 100 pounds. But he went on to play varsity, he said.
He ended his tour of Michigan after midnight, at the head of a long table in a banquet hall in Dearborn, home of about 30,000 Arab-Americans. He was the guest of the publisher of the Arab American News, Osama Siblani, whose paper endorsed Kucinich. He told the table of about 20 Arab-Americans he would repeal the Patriot Act and work to create an independent state for Palestinians.
He predicted the war in Iraq will ultimately be the issue that will change the election.
"It affects everything," he said. "It's about our relationship to the world, our relationship to Islam, world energy policy and our domestic agenda."
Asked by a supporter if he had received any proposals of marriage by Muslim women, he said, "I keep all my options open. I keep a copy of the Quran in my office."
He left the the Greenfield Manor banquet hall a little bleary eyed, his thoughts slowing down, with several men at his elbows, all of them wanting more.
