Kucinich Says New Hampshire Primaries Show Races Wide Open

Press Release

Kucinich says New Hampshire primaries show races wide open

Anti-war candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich said the surprise result of the New Hampshire presidential primary shows the race is far from over.

"I'm the only one who voted against the war, who voted against funding the war 100 percent of the time," he said as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, of New York, won Tuesday's Democratic primary and Sen. John McCain, of Arizona, the Republican race.

Despite finishing a distant fifth in the Democratic primary, the Ohio congressman said he will continue his presidential campaign but also will run for re-election to Congress.

"This election's been a roller coaster," he said. "This election will continue to be unpredictable, and the very unpredictability of it leaves the door open for a candidate like myself pressing issues like health care."

Kucinich has stood out for backing a single-payer health-care system.

He said his staunch opposition to the Iraq war would make him a strong candidate in the general election against McCain, "because if the issue is who's tougher by virtue of support for the war, John McCain will win that debate."

In single digits in the polls, Kucinich has sought to cast himself as having the foresight that his rivals lacked in 2002, repeatedly noting in the debates that he was the only candidate to vote against the war in Iraq and that he has consistently opposed funding it.

The rest of the Democratic field either voted for the war or, like Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, opposed it from outside Congress. Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., both started voting against war-funding bills only in the midst of their White House campaigns.

Kucinich's rhetoric against free-trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement - which President Clinton pushed through Congress in 1993, but which now draws criticism from even Clinton's wife - has been adopted by the leading candidates.

Still, none of his 2008 rivals or fellow Democrats in Congress has embraced Kucinich's latest liberal cause: the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Arguing that Cheney gave misleading claims in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002 and about Iran this year, he said in April that the "vice president's conduct of office has been destructive to the founding purposes of our nation."

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