Dennis the Menace?

When I first heard that Dennis Kucinich was making another White House run, my reaction was a big yawn.

After all, the man who won zero primaries last time is (standard journalistic hedge here) highly unlikely to win, and he knows he's not going to win, so why should the rest of us get terribly excited?

But then I reconsidered.

The Ohio congressman was a strong proponent in the 2004 race of pulling out of Iraq. That was then seen, at least by the media, as a somewhat fringe position. Now, according to the latest polls, it is the majority position in America, depending on the time frame specified. In the latest WashPost poll, for instance, 69 percent say we should withdraw all U.S. combat troops by early 2008, keeping only military training forces there.

But Hillary Clinton, to take one candidate at random, is opposed to setting a timetable. So Kucinich's presence on stage at those cattle-call debates could put pressure on her, especially with Democratic primary voters being more anti-Iraq war than the population as a whole.

I also wonder whether politicians like Kucinich will put pressure on Democrats in Congress to curtail funding for the war or otherwise use the power of the purse to pressure President Bush. I don't think it's likely that a Democratic Congress would do that, even if support for the war continues to slip. But what if some Republican lawmakers came to the conclusion that we needed to get out now, providing their Democratic colleagues with political cover? The closer we get to '08, the more heat that candidates running for reelection are going to feel from their constituents.

The immediate impact of Kucinich's announcement was that he got stories in the major papers and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN. That's one of the reasons that dark horses make the run, so they can grab some media attention for themselves and their ideas. (And in Kucinich's case, a date, following a contest arranged by a political Web site after the candidate said he was looking for a mate. This time around, he's married.)

But it's only fair to note that many more Americans now agree with Kucinich's original position on the war.

At the Huffington Post, Mark Weisbrot and Robert Naiman object to the snarky tone of the initial stories:

"Representative Dennis Kucinich announced Tuesday his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, emphasizing his call to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and to cut off funding for the war to bring that about.

"If you learned this from some of the mainstream media, you might also have learned that our nation's newspapers apparently think that this wasn't a news story, but an opportunity for ridicule.

"Here's what the not-too-bad Washington Post story had to say: