By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich , who recently ended his second long‑shot campaign for the presidency, is knuckling down in the Cleveland-based 10th District he has long used as a national platform to denounce the Iraq War and international trade pacts.

Kucinich last month terminated his 2008 White House campaign to concentrate fully on his re-election campaign, which he has acknowledged is his most competitive yet. Four Democrats are challenging his renomination in the primary election on Tuesday — and they say Kucinich has been an absentee legislator who is more interested in idealistic attempts for the White House than in the day-to-day concerns of his constituents.

First elected in 1996, Kucinich hasn’t been vigorously challenged in a primary election. Two years ago, Kucinich easily turned back a low-profile challenge from Democrat Barbara Anne Ferris, who took 24 percent of the vote and received backing from the editorial page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper. It seems clear the anti-Kucinich vote will be higher this year, though the congressman — a fixture in Cleveland-area politics for several decades — is favored to win.

Kucinich’s most serious challenger appears to be Joe Cimperman, a Cleveland city councilman who hasn’t shied from delivering hard-hitting criticisms of Kucinich. “Let’s not be fooled again: Mr. Kucinich is not a congressman, he’s a showman. Mr. Kucinich is not a workhorse, he is a showhorse,” Cimperman said at a Feb. 19 debate that was sponsored by the City Club of Cleveland.

Cimperman says that he’s worked with business and labor groups to attract 5,000 jobs to the region, and he vows to be the full-time congressman that he says Kucinich is not. Cimperman is regarded as Kucinich’s most threatening opponent in part because he has raised more money than any of the other Democratic candidates — $487,000 through Feb. 13.

Kucinich, meanwhile, reported collecting $689,000 between the beginning of this year and Feb. 13 — most of it in smaller “unitemized” donations. He’s collecting checks from donors all over the United States.

A poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on Feb. 25 of 470 likely Democratic primary voters had Kucinich comfortably leading Cimperman, 55 percent to 29 percent. Most of the remainder of the vote was split among the other three Democrats: Thomas O’Grady, a suburban mayor; Rosemary Palmer, an educator and journalist; and Ferris.

Kucinich could have sought both offices simultaneously, as the law allows in Ohio and some other states (including Texas, where Republican Rep. Ron Paul of the state’s 14th District is running in the March 4 primaries for president and for Congress). Kucinich will still appear on the March 4 ballot as a presidential candidate because he ended his presidential campaign a few weeks after the candidate filing deadline.

In 2004, Kucinich was renominated in the Democratic primary with 87 percent of the vote; in the simultaneous presidential balloting, he finished third, with 27 percent of the vote, behind Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards .

In this congressional campaign, Kucinich is talking about the same issues he emphasized during his presidential bids, though he’s giving them more of a local flavor. He said during the Feb. 19 debate that the Iraq War is a “local issue as well” and that it has cost the nation too much “blood and treasure.” He’s touted his work to protect the area’s steel and automotive industries and blamed area job losses on international trade pacts such as NAFTA. As during his presidential campaigns, Kucinich is promoting a bill to implement a “single payer” government-run health care system.

“Time after time, I’ve shown the leadership that people have a right to expect in a member of Congress. And I’ve done it without fear or favor, because people know that I cannot be bought nor can I be bossed,” Kucinich said. “And it’s that political independence that becomes more essential than ever — to have a leader in the United States Congress who can truly stand up for the people.”

No fan of Kucinich’s, the Plain Dealer’s editorial page has endorsed Cimperman and criticized Kucinich for waging “two embarrassingly ineffective presidential campaigns since 2004, while his district and all of Northeast Ohio have continued to suffer from economic decline and federal neglect.”

Cimperman has taken some hits for his record on the city council and for residing just outside the 10th District, in the adjacent 11th District of Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones . Members of Congress are required under the Constitution to reside in the states they represent.

The Democratic contest also includes Palmer, whose son died in Iraq. Like Kucinich, she’s a longstanding opponent of the Iraq War. But Palmer says Kucinich hasn’t formed the political alliances needed to bring to fruition his goal to end the war expeditiously. Her supporters include Paul Hackett, the Iraq War veteran who attracted some national attention in 2005 after nearly winning a special election in a strongly Republican-leaning district in and around Cincinnati.

O’Grady is portraying himself as a well-rounded candidate who has lived abroad, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, served in the military and taught history and government in the Cleveland area. He’s noted that most of Ohio’s 10th District is suburban; about 190,000 of the 631,000 district residents live in Cleveland, with the rest in close-in suburbs such as Parma, Lakewood and O’Grady’s hometown of North Olmsted (which has about 34,000 residents).

The contest will feature a high turnout — more so because of the intense interest in the Democratic presidential primary contest between New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama . Most voters who cast a ballot in that race also will make a choice in the congressional primary.

Ohio’s 10th District has a distinct Democratic lean — Kerry took 58 percent of the vote in the 2004 election. But the Republicans probably will nominate a credible candidate — Jim Trakas, a former state House member who is favored in Tuesday’s GOP balloting over Jason Werner, who lost the 2006 Republican primary in Ohio’s 10th.