Ideology isn't enough
BEDFORD, N.H. -- Fickle voters are not the only ones who sometimes choose a candidate for personal rather than ideological reasons. Consider Dennis J. Kucinich, the most vociferously liberal, antiwar candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
On Monday, when it was clear that the Ohio representative could not win enough votes to be viable in the Iowa caucuses, Kucinich asked his supporters to throw their votes behind North Carolina Senator John Edwards. It was a curious choice, given Edwards's votes in support of the congressional resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and in favor of the Patriot Act of 2001, a measure Kucinich regularly denounces as an assault on fundamental civil liberties.
"The tie-breaker was `Who's my friend?' John Edwards is my friend," explained Kucinich, who yesterday was barnstorming through southern New Hampshire hours after garnering less than 2 percent of the votes cast by Iowa Democrats. "If I was waiting to pair up with someone who agrees with me, I would still be waiting."
To be sure, Kucinich has other policy disagreements with Howard Dean -- on trade and universal health insurance, for instance -- but it is Dean who has forced the Democratic field to confront Bush on what Kucinich has repeatedly called the most important issue facing the nation: the human and financial cost of the war in Iraq. Why not help an antiwar ally in his hour of need?
"Dr. Dean did not consistently oppose the initial stages of this war and he has said that he will keep our troops in Iraq," Kucinich argued less than convincingly, his antiwar purism undercut by the even more hawkish early positions of his Capitol Hill colleague, Edwards, and the other Democratic candidates.
Parsing the motivation of one vanity presidential candidate is no easier than analyzing the choices of 120,000 Iowa Democrats who handed him a dismal fifth-place finish. Maybe Kucinich, like the national press corps, has concluded that the former Vermont governor is just too angry to be president. "I was impressed by the more optimistic tone Senator Edwards has set in his campaign," Kucinich offered as another rationale for releasing his Iowa supporters to the first-term southern senator.
Maybe biography trumped ideology for Kucinich, the former mayor of Cleveland. As the son of a North Carolina textile mill worker and a postal clerk, Edwards had a childhood that more closely mirrors Kucinich's own working class roots than the privileged upbringing shared by Dean and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry. Kucinich reminded supporters again yesterday that he is the oldest of seven children, that his family moved 21 times before he was 17 years old, that his parents never owned a home, and that sometimes the family was forced by financial realities to live in their car.
Or, maybe, the maverick Ohio congressman is not so different from the establishment politicians his core supporters so disdain. The 50 or so people who gathered at the Wayfarer Inn yesterday to listen to Kucinich's "State of the Nation" address included 20 young artists and activists who poured out of a painted bus, looking less like seasoned political operatives than refugees from Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters.
Wearing jester hats and banging African drums, members of the Democreation Project greeted other Kucinich supporters and the few undecided voters who came out to hear the candidate. They are following Kucinich across the country in their converted 1976 psychedelic school bus that burns "biodegradable, nontoxic" fuel made from soybeans.
Dan Nelson, cofounder of the group, said he and the others were drawn to Kucinich's candidacy because of "his combination of solid progressive values with a refined, even mystical, ethicality that makes him unique among politicians."
In addition to which, he's very good to his friends.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
