"Who's Afraid of Dennis Kucinich?"

If you haven't read this Nation article about Dennis Kucinich, go read it now. Snippet:

The politics of Dennis Kucinich are easy to see but hard to describe, which is why conventional journalism, comfortable only with crass idiocies, has settled on calling him a leftist and burying him in the thirteenth paragraph. But to me the best way to describe Kucinich is to say that he seems to be the only candidate who responds as an intellectually ambitious human being would to the problem of the presidency. When you think about it--and few people do--no great thinker or leader, no Thoreau or Bertrand Russell or Martin Luther King Jr., would look at the vastly complex problem of the human condition and see as the most urgent solutions incremental numerical adjustments of the type espoused by most candidates. It is hard to imagine a Gandhi feeling passionate about a 30 percent tax credit for investment in renewable energy (Gephardt), or $66 billion for Iraq instead of $87 billion (Edwards), or a Community Oriented Policing Program ("COPS," a Kerry creature) that puts a few more cops on the streets. No, the great leader would see vast sicknesses to tend to, gross misapplications of human effort, problems rooted not in numbers but in society's emotional priorities. And his solutions upon taking a great office would be of commensurate greatness: the elimination of war, the conquest of greed, the restoration of community. I'm not saying Kucinich is a great man. But he does think in these terms. He is clearly an intellectual who is measuring himself against history, not the other candidates. And it is this disdain for the other kind of ambition that has led observers to describe him as unserious.