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"Measure me by my life," Kerry is fond of telling audiences on the campaign trail. "That's how you know that nothing that I'm saying to you is just words." The chapters of Kerry's life before he came to Washington are pretty simple: a swift-boat captain in the Mekong Delta who stormed a Viet Cong position, took out the enemy with a grenade launcher and came out with a Silver Star; a principled protester who chastised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at age 27; then an ambitious prosecutor who put mobsters behind bars. But a reckoning of Kerry's life in Washington is harder to make. Friends and enemies alike can find in his 19 years and 6,500 votes in the Senate whatever they are looking for: bold words that suggest fresh ideas but a lack of follow-through that suggests political caution; shifting positions on education, welfare and affirmative action that show either a capacity for growth or an absence of core beliefs. Does the shortage of laws with his name on them show that to get things done, you need to share credit, or that he hasn't done much to deserve any?
Kerry may be running on his experience, but recent history suggests it may not prove all that helpful. Most longtime Senators have led complex legislative lives, steering a course past 99 other egos through the contradictions and compromises that may one day be hard to explain. In fact, no one has swept into the White House trailing a long legislative record since Lyndon Johnson; no one has made the jump directly from the Senate since John F. Kennedy.
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Senators: the workhorse legislators, who focus on kneading bills and amendments into laws, and the show-horse chief executives, who tend not to play well with the other Senators and are more likely to be associated with some high-profile investigation than any particular issue. Ted Kennedy is the icon of the Democratic legislators, with his clubby style and his high-octane policy machine and his name on or near every major piece of legislation having to do with health or education or welfare. Elected in Kennedy's shadow, the junior Senator from Massachusetts had good reason to make his name elsewhere.
So Kerry became one of the rare Senators to turn down a spot on the coveted Appropriations Committee, from which he could have brought home lots of bridges and highways to Massachusetts, and instead picked the more cerebral Foreign Relations Committee. This may have seemed natural for the Swiss-educated son of a foreign service officer, but few elections are won or lost over where you stand on Third World debt. In Kerry's case, however, the choice reflected his history as a prosecutor and his scars from Vietnam, a desire to hold accountable a government that had been known to lie heading into or out of an ambiguous war.