Kucinich Says He’ll Carry On

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis J. Kucinich is not interested in conventional wisdom. Skimpy audiences, naysaying pundits and late-night jokes aside, the unabashedly liberal presidential hopeful is still in the race -- and has no plans of leaving.

Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, campaigned in California this week, raising money and looking for a date on “The Tonight Show.”

“I’m in this race all the way to the convention,” Kucinich told yet another reporter who asked him why he was still campaigning.

Kucinich did get a bit of a boost from two third-place finishes in the Maine and Washington primaries last weekend, behind Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

He won 15% of the vote in Maine, his best -- and first double-digit -- showing, in spite of what his campaign called “a virtual blackout of his campaign by the national media.”

While television and newspaper reporters focus on Kerry and other candidates, Kucinich keeps talking about his platform, which includes replacing U.S. troops in Iraq with U.N. peacekeepers, implementing universal healthcare and bolstering the economy with a massive, New Deal-style public works program to rebuild urban infrastructure.

But is anyone listening?

Kucinich was mentioned in print the least of all the candidates in the first week in February -- 560 times -- according to a tracking study of about 500 major news publications by Factiva, a media search and archive service run by Dow Jones & Co. and Reuters. That’s about one-quarter of Kerry’s 2,410 mentions.

Despite the lack of coverage, Kucinich’s respectable showings in Washington and Maine have jump-started fundraising that will help him stay in the race until the Democratic National Convention in July.

Supporters contributed about $100,000 to Kucinich early last week after his strong primary finishes, and another $100,000 the previous week.

“We’re really on an upward trend right now,” said the campaign’s national media coordinator, Susan Mainzer. “That’s not something that a lot of the other campaigns can say.”

Mainzer anticipated raising at least $200,000 this weekend in Wisconsin.

The campaign, which says it has raised at least $9 million, says it believes the candidate is on the move. But he has only two “superdelegates” -- and none of the pledged delegates that are won in state contests -- out of the 2,161 needed to win the nomination.

The next big challenge after Wisconsin’s primary Tuesday is California, a Democratic-leaning state that holds its primary March 2 and where Kucinich has been cultivating a loyal network of supporters. “Our campaign is very well-organized in California,” Kucinich said Thursday in Los Angeles. “I think there’ll be some congressional districts where we’ll do very well. I expect to come out of California with a bloc of delegates.”

He told the 30 or so die-hards gathered in MacArthur Park to hear him last week of his plans to cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement and opt out of the World Trade Organization, and offer immigrants a path to citizenship.

“We know that corporate, global trade has been about one thing and one thing only, and that is about a race to the bottom in wages,” he told supporters, who included actor Ed Asner and leaders of Homies Unidos, a Los Angeles nonprofit that works to prevent gang violence.

The group’s executive director, Silvia Beltran, supports Kucinich in spite of the odds against him.

“Stick to your principles and your beliefs,” she said. “Who do you think is going to help create a healthier, a better, community for all of us?”

The candidate’s stops included Burbank, where he appeared on NBC’s “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” as a contestant on a late-night version of “The Dating Game.”

Leno introduced the twice-divorced and now single congressman: “We’ve kept him offstage in an isolated room, cut off from everything -- kind of like his campaign headquarters.”

A sheepishly grinning Kucinich asked silly questions (“Which do you prefer -- paper or plastic?”) of the three hidden bachelorettes: actresses Jennifer Tilly and Cybill Shepherd, and Kim Serafin, a political commentator and former spokeswoman for former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Kucinich opted for a date with Tilly, winning dinner for two at a Santa Monica vegan restaurant to suit the Ohio lawmaker’s dietary restrictions.

Offbeat himself, the candidate said he thought California’s political iconoclasm could help his cause:

“See, the one thing about California ... the whole country might go one way, California can go the other.”