The Love Song of Dennis J. Kucinich

So Elizabeth's boss and Dennis discussed monetary policy for about eight minutes. As Dennis later told his buddy Shirley MacLaine, he had to stop looking at Elizabeth for fear he'd declare his love for her right then and there.

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"Did I give the slightest indication?" Kucinich asks his wife on the couch. "Tell me -- I didn't."

"Maybe not consciously," Elizabeth says, "but I did walk out and I phoned my grandmother and said, 'I've met a congressman and he's fallen in love with me.' "

Dennis gives a deep belly laugh. He seems amazed once again. Elizabeth caresses the spot above his ear where the black hair is turning gray. "I'd fallen in love with him, too, but I didn't tell her that bit," she says.

Kucinich gave the redhead and her boss copies of a bill proposing a U.S. Department of Peace. And he gave them his e-mail address, hoping she'd get the hint. They left.

He ran down to the floor of the House beaming.

He told his friends: "I met her." He didn't say who. He didn't explain what. He just said, simply: "I met her."

"I said, 'Well, Dennis, this is deep,' " recalls Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio).

"I didn't know what he was talking about," recalls Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).

Against the Odds

The improbable journey of Dennis Kucinich:

Oldest of seven. Grew up so poor in working-class Cleveland that the family sometimes had to sleep in the car. As a kid, he scrubbed floors and shined shoes. He and his siblings lived briefly in an orphanage. He was short, he stuttered, he had asthma, and he had Crohn's disease, a chronic and painful inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. In high school, he played varsity football at 4-foot-9 and 89 pounds. (His teammates tossed him into a garbage can.) When he was 21, doctors removed eight feet of his small bowel and colon.

He worked his way through college and a master's degree in speech communications, and then he worked his way through the Cleveland City Council and the city post of clerk of the courts. In 1977, at age 31, he was elected "boy mayor" of the city.