On some level, Bush had a point. Although Kerry has spent two decades in the Senate, he is hard-pressed to identify big-ticket legislative accomplishments. No major legislation bears his name, and the few bills he has introduced and seen through to a presidential signature have been either ceremonial or relatively obscure -- measures like Senate Bill 1206 from 1994, which renamed a federal building in Waltham, Mass., and Senate Bill 791 from 1999, which made changes to something called the Women's Business Centers Program. While these bills may have been important to a relatively small group of people somewhere, they're not exactly McCain-Feingold or the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"Kerry has not been someone who initiated a lot of legislation," says David King, the research director for Harvard's Institute of Politics and the head of the university's program for newly elected members of Congress. King said that, by temperament and by his position as Massachusetts' junior senator, Kerry often found himself working in Ted Kennedy's shadow. Kerry left the heavy legislative lifting to Kennedy. When he has introduced bills, King said, "he would introduce them late in the session, just before an election. They were bills that you and I know were not going anywhere."

As the Boston Globe reported in its multi-part profile of Kerry, the senator stumbled during a 1996 debate when he was asked to name three things he had done to help the people of Massachusetts. "There was a targeted capital gains tax cut for start-up companies, he said, and reauthorization of federal fishing acts that gave funds to help fishermen, and a rewrite of the national flood insurance law." With more time to think, the Globe said, "Kerry might have improved his response -- but not by much."

Kerry had eight years to think before Howard Dean put a similar question to him in January. At a Democratic candidates' debate, Dean accused Kerry of having a modest legislative record. Rather than citing any accomplishments in his defense, Kerry suggested that the former Vermont governor didn't understand "how things work in Congress if you want to get things done." He said that there were ways to work behind the scenes on legislation, to get your bill passed on someone else's bill."

Kerry didn't do much better at last month's convention. "When I came to the Senate," he said in Boston, "I broke with many in my own party to vote for a balanced budget because I thought it was the right thing to do. I fought to put 100,000 police officers on the streets of America. And then I reached out across the aisle with John McCain to work to find the truth about our POWs and missing in action and to finally make peace in Vietnam."

Twenty years in the Senate, and that was it. His campaign tried to round out the picture with heartwarming video "moments" about the little things Kerry did as a senator -- he interceded with Little League officials to ensure that disabled kids could play ball, he came home from an overseas trip to mourn the deaths of local firefighters. The videos may have softened Kerry's aloof image, but in the end they probably spoke more to the skills of Kerry's constituent-services staff than to his own ability as a legislator.

Kerry's staff continues to argue that he has been an effective legislator in a behind-the-scenes way, leading the fight here, helping with an amendment there. The Kerry campaign also stresses that some other seemingly accomplished legislators, like Kennedy and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, have relatively low success rates when it comes to getting bills signed into law. In an e-mail to reporters last week, Kerry's campaign noted that Cheney saw only two of his bills become law during his 11-year run in Congress.

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