WASHINGTON — Day after day, 12-year-old Dennis Kucinich wore the same pair of turquoise blue pinstriped pants to school.

Other kids teased him about the pants, which he'd bought for a quarter at a Salvation Army store, but Kucinich had nothing else to wear. Finally, a nun at his school told him to stay after class and gave him and his family boxes of clothes.

"It was an extraordinary act of charity," the Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview. "Every step along the way there were people there to help us."

Kucinich is a product of west Cleveland, a middle-class urban community that thrived when America's factories were humming, but has been struggling to survive for at least a generation.

Like so many Rust Belt ethnic enclaves, the congressman's district is still largely populated by scrappers, people who worked with their hands and lived by their wits and relied heavily on their governments — state, local and federal — for safety nets and jobs when times were bad.

It's long been a place where politicians are friends, neighbors and favor-dispensers. Maintaining that street-level sense has been the key to Kucinich's rocky yet ultimately triumphant political career, one that saw him become mayor of Cleveland in 1977, at age 31, then saw him nearly recalled from office as the media mocked him as "Dennis the Menace."

Kucinich rose from a childhood in which he lived in 21 different places, including a car and an orphanage. He survived his childhood by being smart — his mother taught him to read by age 3 — and brash.

By 23 he was a Cleveland city councilman. Eight years later, he became the "boy mayor."

The signature issue of his tenure became his bid to stave off the sale of the city's power system to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., a move that led to the city's 1978 default, the first for a city since the Great Depression.

Kucinich lost his re-election bid, but years later he claimed vindication, saying the city power system wound up saving consumers millions.

Still, his reputation as an impetuous risk-taker now seemed cemented in American political lore.

In his 1999 book, "The American Mayor: The Best & Worst Big City Leaders," historian Melvin G. Holli ranked Kucinich among the worst. Holli cited Kucinich's "abrasive, intemperate and confrontational populist political style" and said he presided over a "disorderly and chaotic administration."

Kucinich mounted a slow, steady comeback, eventually winning election to the Ohio Senate and, in 1996, a congressional seat by beating a two-term Republican incumbent.

In 2004, Kucinich ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. Though he finished a distant sixth in the New Hampshire primary with 1.4 percent of the vote, he developed a devoted following among anti-war activists.

Susan Bruce, a New Hampshire community organizer who's the coordinator of his state campaign, recalled how she backed anti-war activist Howard Dean over Kucinich in 2004 "because we thought Dean could win."

"I was being pragmatic," she said. Instead Dean lost, and the anti-war crowd found itself without a favorite candidate. This time, she said, she won't make the same mistake.

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