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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
While the numerical comparison of bills passed makes for an easy tit-for-tat, Congress experts agree that it's a simplistic way of measuring relative senatorial success. "I don't think, taken by itself, that it's a fair way to compare," says Yale political science professor David Mayhew. "It's easy to get your name on something if you're the chairman of a committee." Besides, he says, "legislating is not the only thing that they do that makes them important." Mayhew says there are three ways for a member of Congress to distinguish himself: as a legislator, as a leader of the public discourse -- think Sunday talk regulars like Jesse Helms or Joseph Biden -- or as an investigator.
Kerry has made his mark as the latter. As freshman senators in 1985, Kerry and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin sent themselves on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua to assess the dangers posed by the Sandinista government. Upon their return, Kerry began to receive tips suggesting that the Reagan administration was illegally funneling aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, the rebels struggling to overthrow the Sandinista government, and that the Contras were using supply chains established with U.S. assistance to carry on a bustling drug trade. Kerry took it upon himself to launch a probe. In the months ahead, he developed enough information to persuade more senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to conduct a full-scale investigation.
In a follow-up investigation, Kerry developed information that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was trafficking in drugs and sending money out of the country to the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, or BCCI. Kerry launched another investigation and developed information leading to criminal indictments and the collapse of BCCI in 1991.
A year later, Kerry and Sen. John McCain led a Senate select committee assigned to investigate whether American prisoners of war were still being held in Vietnam. After an exhaustive investigation, they reported finding no evidence that any American was still being held. Based on that finding, the two Vietnam veterans, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, worked together in an effort that would ultimately lead President Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam in 1995.
It's an impressive record of investigative work, but the Kerry campaign has said little about it. Indeed, as the New York Times noted over the weekend, the Kerry campaign seldom even uses the word "senator" to describe him. Part of that may stem from an understandable desire to avoid reminding voters that Kerry is a longtime Washington insider; in the last century, only two sitting senators -- Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy -- have gone straight from the Capitol to the White House. But in failing to define his Senate career himself, Kerry allows the Republicans to do it for him in a less than desirable way. The GOP isn't going to focus on Kerry's investigative work -- why play to his strengths, and why remind voters of the congressional investigations into 9/11 and the war on Iraq?
Instead, the Republicans focus almost exclusively on his Senate votes. In thousands of votes cast over 20 years, the Democratic nominee has been forced to take a public position on virtually every issue of public importance. With so many votes on so many bills, there's room for every sort of interpretation and spin. The Bush-Cheney campaign is interested in just one: Kerry is an extreme liberal, out of touch with "mainstream" America.
At a county fair in Mississippi last month, Republican Sen. Trent Lott declared Kerry a "French-speaking socialist" who is "more liberal than Ted Kennedy." The Republican leadership routinely refers to Kerry-Edwards as the "most liberal ticket" of all time, and the right's allies in the media repeat the charge. The truth is this: While Kerry's voting record puts him to the left side of what passes for the center in American politics today, it's a stretch to call him -- as Bush frequently has -- the nation's most liberal senator.
"Assertions that the Democrats' presumptive nominees are extreme liberals fall flat," Brookings Institution fellows Sarah Binder and Thomas Mann wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece based on a study of senators' lifetime voting records. "True, Mr. Kerry's voting record places him to the left of today's median Senate Democrat (Tom Daschle of South Dakota). But he is closer to the center of the Democratic Party than he is to the most liberal senators, including Mr. Kennedy."
