“Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible,” Dennis Kucinich told Steven Colbert the other night.

The quote, from the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamono, says almost everything you need to know about the ideological purity of the progressive congressman from Ohio and why he’s making this second run for the presidency.

He is a walking litmus test of progressive purity:

He wants us out of Iraq immediately. Moreover, he’s the only Democratic candidate who not only spoke against the war back in 2002—he actually voted against it. Plus, he consistently voted against all subsequent war funding.

He voted against the Patriot Act, too.

He voted against NAFTA and CAFTA.

He cosponsored a bill to create a single-payer national health service.

He favors same-sex marriage.

He is outspoken on all the hot-button issues and fearlessly defends his positions.

On one of those apple-pie, super-patriotic, but essentially empty commemorative 9/11 resolutions, he was the only congressman to vote “no” because it said nothing of “the lies that took us into Iraq, the lies that keep us there, the lies that are being used to set the stage for war against Iran and the lies that have undermined our basic civil liberties here at home.”

Yes, once he was anti-abortion, as was Jesse Jackson, and now pro-choice, but that’s about his only flip-flop.

The guy started running for office in Cleveland at age 21, lost, but won a council seat two years later. He runs and loses, runs and wins, keeps coming back for more. He was elected Cleveland’s youngest mayor at 29 back in 1975, which is what put him on the national map.

The city was going broke and he was under intense pressure to sell its municipally owned electric utility—the kind we ought to have in Chicago—sort of a local TVA. But he stood on principle, refused to sell, was subjected to a recall, survived it, but lost the next election. He was damned for the city’s fiscal problems for years—but nearly two decades later the city council ultimately thanked him for standing up and eventually saving the city hundreds of millions.

After losing the election he went into a kind of exile, went broke, came back to Ohio, running and losing, running and winning and finally gaining the congressional seat he holds today. All it took was guts and principle and drive and belief.

The man is a prophet. So naturally enough in American politics, he is either vilified or ridiculed. The bottom line is, he stays at the bottom of the polls. Rather than examine his ideas, the press prefers to write about his veganism or his shortness of stature or the fact that he’s got this totally gorgeous wife.

Of course he’s not going to fare any better in 2008 than he did in 2004, even though he is the ideological choice of damn near everybody I know (my editors here excluded).

We’re all torn between purity and practicality, between elation and electability, but thank whomever that Dennis is still there articulating and standing up for what a lot of us still say we believe in.

I just wish there were more of him.

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Don Rose, a regular (and highly esteemed) political analyst for The Chicago Daily Observer is dead-on right about one statement he makes in this highly readable and enjoyable column. Guess what it is? Your comments are invited! (TR, chairman of the editorial board).