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Joe Cimperman hopes to tear down his former hero, Dennis Kucinich

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A few weeks later, Cimperman delivered a gift basket — stuffed with sausages and a map of Cuyahoga County — to Kucinich's house. The message: In case you forgot about Cleveland . . .

The next week, a staffer filmed him as he went to Kucinich's office to drop off a "missing" flier featuring the congressman's face.

It's hard to say how the theatrics played with voters, but they clearly got under the skin of Kucinich, who responded with the harrumphing of a man who'd been gone from Cleveland far too long.

The congressman called the gift-basket stunt the most intrusive of his career. "I am ready to encounter any kind of dirty tricks or aggression toward my personal space," he declared to supporters the next day. And after Cimperman appeared at this office with the "missing" flier, Kucinich ratted him to Homeland Security, claiming the video camera violated his constituents' privacy rights.

But campaign stunts didn't force the congressman back to Cleveland. Cimperman's ability to raise money did.

During his last presidential campaign, Kucinich stayed in the race so long after John Kerry locked up the nomination that he violated rules governing the $3 million in federal campaign funds he'd received. (Kucinich was forced to reimburse taxpayers $137,000.)

But this time he didn't have the luxury to continue his doomed presidential bid. Cimperman had raised $205,000 by the end of 2007, and he wasn't modest about spending it.

He immediately launched TV ads attacking Kucinich's most vulnerable flanks, accusing him of ignoring his job and failing to deliver anything meaningful to the district.

Kucinich was forced to cut short his presidential bid and scurry back to Cleveland. He seemed to understand that he faced a legitimate threat, an opponent regarded as such a tireless campaigner and aggressive self-promoter that he's often accused of grandstanding.

In other words, Kucinich had come home to battle a younger version of himself.

St. Clair-Superior looks like much of the East Side between downtown and University Circle, with boarded-up homes, overgrown lots, and sloppy graffiti scrawled across brick and plywood. But Cimperman sees it differently. "This is my hood," he says as he navigates his wife's Subaru wagon down a barren street. "This is where I grew up. There's a different energy here."

He drives past a large snow-covered lot, scattered with a few overturned traffic cones. "This is the practice field we built," he says proudly, pointing to a hand-painted sign that reads "EMS Rams," for the neighborhood's youth football team. "The neighbors originally saw this as a development parcel, but now they love seeing — hold on. Motherfucker."

Cimperman swerves to a stop and jumps out, leaving the door open behind him. What's raised his ire is a plastic sign for a carpet-cleaning service, stapled to a light pole. He rips it off and stalks back to the car. "Sorry," he says. He's wide-eyed, breathing heavily, nearly too upset to speak. "I hate those signs."

Lying torn in the back seat, the offending sign looks harmless enough. But it's not to Joe Cimperman. "That just bugs the crap out of me. To think that you can just put your crap up like that. Why? This isn't a crap neighborhood. Think those things go up in Geauga County? They need their carpets cleaned there too."

As we pull onto another street, Cimperman suddenly forgets about carpet signs. He's onto his next story, a requisite for every Rust Belt politician: The How I Channeled Childhood Grief Into Political Ambition Tale.

Like Kucinich, Cimperman often refers to himself as a "son of Cleveland." His family was Slovenian, his father a union machinist. But by the time Cimperman was 11, his mother was in and out of hospitals with severe bipolar disorder, leaving her shy, bookish son and his older sister to care for themselves.

When she was home, mental illness turned Mom, who was a tour guide before immigrating from Slovenia and was fluent in seven languages, into an unstable wreck. Cimperman recalls the time his father received a $1,000 phone bill — his mother was spending her nights phoning the Vatican, trying to reach higher-ups to complain about church policy.

To his father, the sickness was foreign. "He didn't understand it," he says. "In an older ethnic world, you understand cancer, you understand getting your arm cut off in a machine, and being born with polio. You don't get mental-health illness. It's seen as something to be ashamed of."

With degrees from Saint Ignatius and John Carroll that stressed public service, Cimperman eventually left home for Portland, Maine, to work as a Jesuit volunteer for the mentally retarded. That led him to an AIDS hospice in Baltimore, where he only found more grief.

"This was '95. There were no cocktails of drugs you could take . . . Every new person I met died."

He recalls one patient named Kevin, a Baptist preacher who told his congregation that he was dying of cancer. "I went to Kevin's funeral, and everybody was talking about how evil cancer was," says Cimperman. "It was like, Jesus, God, he was gay. He had AIDS. Even in his death, can't you let him have the truth?

"I started thinking: If a straight white guy with my background — and 5,000 people like me — had AIDS, would the National Institute of Health maybe have found a cure by now? I realized politics is the application of power to will."

He also realized something else. "I had to get the hell out of Baltimore. It was changing me, making me dark." So he made tracks for the hometown he'd fled two years before.

By age 27, it was already clear he had the ambition gene of a career politician. Cimperman threw his hat into the race for the downtown council seat. There were nine candidates, including incumbent John Skrha.

"We just worked harder than any of the other eight people," says Will Johnston, Cimperman's unofficial manager for that campaign. "We used everyone's overconfidence to our advantage."

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