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Dennis J. Kucinich was 33 when, having been drummed out of the Cleveland mayor's office, he set out on what he calls his "quest for meaning." His city was in financial default — the embarrassment of the nation. His political career was in tatters, his bank account dangerously low. Not even the radio talk shows would hire him.

So he left the Rust Belt in the winter of 1979, headed west to California and, eventually, New Mexico, to write and think. There, in the austere beauty of the desert outside Santa Fe, he sought out a spiritual healer who, he says, led him on a path toward inner peace. "That," Mr. Kucinich said, "is where I discovered that war is not inevitable."

Now, after a stunning political comeback that culminated with his election to the House of Representatives in 1996, Mr. Kucinich — the boy mayor who was so bombastic he fired his police chief live on the 6 o'clock news — is seeking the White House, on a platform of "nonviolence as an organizing principle of society." He wants to pull out of Iraq, sharply reduce the Pentagon budget and establish a cabinet-level Department of Peace.

At 57, he keeps to a strict vegan diet; on a cold December night in Cleveland, Mr. Kucinich padded about his kitchen in stocking feet — no shoes are allowed in the Kucinich home — and ate Chinese bean curd for dinner. He is twice divorced but open to a new relationship, even going so far as to advertise his availability during a candidates' debate. His campaign manager is a "transformational kinesiologist" — a practitioner of the healing arts — who has never before worked in politics.

As he hopscotches around the country, delivering speeches that blend the themes of John Lennon with an ardent defense of the working class, Mr. Kucinich — a slim man at 5-foot-7, 135 pounds — has become the boutique candidate for peace activists and Hollywood liberals. Willie Nelson and Bonnie Raitt are the headliners of a fund-raiser concert for him this week. Ed Asner, the actor, likens Mr. Kucinich to "a prophet speaking the truth."

Yet his poll numbers are in the single digits, and not one member of his own Ohio Congressional delegation has endorsed him. He has raised $5 million, vastly more than the Rev. Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, but a pittance compared to the $40 million raised by Howard Dean.

Still Mr. Kucinich runs, perhaps because that is all he knows how to do. Perhaps it fulfills his belief, held since boyhood, that the White House is his destiny. Or perhaps, those who know him say, Mr. Kucinich runs out of a deep-seated desire — forged as the eldest of seven children in a desperately poor family — to rise above his roots.

"I think he has had to fight a terrible emptiness that many of us have been blessed not to have," said Tim Hagan, a former Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio who has known Mr. Kucinich for 30 years. "I think that's what drives him. He is driven by a sense of affirming to the world that he counts, that his voice should be heard, that he is somebody to be taken with real seriousness."

That he does not seem to stand a chance does not faze Mr. Kucinich. He is convinced, he says, that there is "a readiness on the part of the electorate to embrace" his vision for America, if only they have an opportunity to hear it. No matter that voters outside the ethnic wards of Cleveland can barely pronounce his Croatian surname. (It is pronounced koo-SIN-itch.)

The candidate says they will learn.

"I make the impossible possible," he told a radio interviewer in Houston, from the cellphone in his kitchen that cold December night. "That's what I specialize in."

Setting a Goal

St. John Cantius School, a tiny Roman Catholic high school on Cleveland's west side, has been shuttered for years now, a victim of declining enrollment. Lorene Wolski Mihalko remembers the first day she saw Dennis Kucinich there, at their freshman induction ceremony in the fall of 1960, a sprite of a boy delivering "the most dynamic speech" she had ever heard.

"He looked," Mrs. Mihalko said, "like he was 9 years old."