National Journal
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Friday, Jan. 30, 2004

He has been in the Senate 19 years and is the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, but John Kerry is still not exactly a household name. Even after his come-from-behind win in the caucuses of Iowa and his decisive victory in the New Hampshire primary, the Massachusetts senator has yet to establish a clear identity with voters across the country.

A look at 10 issues that most everyone is likely to highlight about John Kerry in coming weeks.

The lack of a strong image provides Kerry as well as his opponents with opportunities in the coming weeks, as voters head to the polls in a succession of states across the country. The lanky 6-foot-4 New Englander will try to combine a newcomer's appeal with political anecdotes and war stories that prove he has the experience and know-how to be commander-in-chief in perilous times. In New Hampshire, Kerry toted up 38 percent of the vote by appealing to enough voters who think he's the candidate best positioned to beat President Bush; who are liberal or independent; who are angry about the war in Iraq or merely dissatisfied; or who are worried most about health care or jobs. If it holds, that kind of crosscutting success is a plus, whether you're known as a Washington insider or a newcomer on the national stage. Kerry's detractors, meanwhile, will try to portray him as an out-of-touch aristocrat, far from the political mainstream, who all too often has his finger to the prevailing political winds.

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It is striking that a man who has been such a part of the rough-and-tumble of Massachusetts politics for more than 25 years, and has been on the Washington scene since his election to the Senate in 1984, remains opaque. Kerry clearly recognizes that he must connect with voters and put an end to the notion that he suffers from too much Yankee reserve.

"A presidential contest is an arena in which you inevitably reveal who you are and what you're made of, just in the course of dealing with the pressures of the campaign itself," he wrote in his recent book, A Call to Service, essentially a campaign blueprint.

Some of Kerry's admirers say that the 60-year-old lawmaker is simply hard to categorize. "He's not an easy-to-peg politician," said Ivan Schlager, a former senior Democratic Senate staff member who trekked to Iowa and New Hampshire to boost Kerry's campaign.

Other observers go even further and suggest that Kerry is elusive. "If he is not unknowable, he is extremely difficult to get to know," said Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "I have heard that from many, many people close to him -- they are in physical proximity but really don't have a clue."

Ross Baker, an expert on the Senate and a political science professor at Rutgers University, adds that even among his fellow senators, Kerry goes his own way. "He is certainly not a senator who hangs out on the floor a lot," Baker said. "He's much more a loner.... He is certainly not among the senators who sing together or have breakfast together."

Still, the notion that this lawmaker with the perennially hang-dog countenance is something of a mystery might seem at odds with his life story. After all, he became a sound-bite sensation when he returned from Navy service and helped to organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry asked in testimony in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- a panel on which he now serves. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Kerry's anti-war activism turned him into a politician, but his years in the Senate have produced scant legislative achievements. For the most part, he has preferred to attack corruption, and he has shown patience for the exacting details of congressional oversight. In the early 1990s, for example, he dived headlong into the fraud investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Working on such investigations usually "doesn't have a lot of charisma to it," Baker said. "Everybody claims that oversight is important, but very few people do it. You do necessary but unspectacular things. It adds little to the luster of a presidential campaign."

In many parts of the country, Kerry is a new face. On February 3, with seven primary states in the lineup, the Massachusetts senator is trying to close the sale as the Democrats' best shot to send President Bush back to Texas. At the same time, his political adversaries -- both those who are battling him for the Democratic nomination and Republicans who support Bush -- will try to underscore Kerry's drawbacks.

In coming weeks, many themes will follow Kerry along the campaign trail. Is his experience as a Navy officer in Vietnam such a compelling story that voters will be drawn to him? Or is he an out-of-touch millionaire? Is his condemnation of the Iraq war at odds with his initial vote to support it?

National Journal examines a Top-10 list of issues that Democrats and Republicans, supporters and detractors, are likely to highlight about John Kerry as the contest to pick a Democratic presidential nominee continues.

Does He Play Well With Others?
Unlike almost all of his rivals for the presidency, including the incumbent, John Kerry had his leadership skills tested in a way that traditionally impresses American voters -- on the battlefield. But political leadership also includes dimensions beyond combat courage, particularly when it comes to being president of the United States. For 30 years, Kerry has played the role of the Intrepid Outsider, criticizing the very institutions he has avidly sought to be a part of. As with the paradox of his military service -- war hero and war protester -- Kerry has tried to be a good legislator, but he also has tried to stand apart from Congress and its ways. Running as an outsider is usually a good electoral strategy, but voters sometimes turn away from a candidate who seems detached from the messy process of getting things done -- just ask Bill Bradley, who nearly beat Al Gore in New Hampshire in 2000 but was out of the race a few weeks later.

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Considering that Kerry is running on his experience in Washington, his critics may well ask why he has failed to make more of an impact during his 19 years in the Senate. He is known for his advocacy of environmental issues but has not spearheaded major environmental legislation. He is perhaps best known for his investigation of an international banking scandal, but the probe served more as a platform for Kerry than as a crusade to bring the culprits to justice.

Unlike other senators who have used their independence to pull together bipartisan majorities for important reforms -- John McCain, R-Ariz., and John Breaux, D-La., for example -- Kerry is rarely at the center of legislative action. Like one of his predecessors from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, Kerry has never sought to play a leadership role in the Senate.

In making his own way in the Senate, Kerry has often stepped on the toes of fellow Democrats. He has campaigned against federal spending projects championed by both Republicans and Democrats. When he pursued his fraud probe of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, he didn't shy away from detailing the roles that former President Carter and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young played in the controversy.

Two former Senate staffers who worked for Kerry's colleagues describe another paradoxical side to Kerry -- his apparent aloofness and lack of focus on some important matters passing through the Senate, and his occasional fascination with causes, to the point of what one described as "obsession." The BCCI scandal was one example of his doggedness, but Kerry also spent years trying to terminate an obscure nuclear reactor research program. The program was based in Illinois and championed by that state's two Democratic senators, and Kerry's unrelenting effort to end the project did not please his colleagues. Kerry also crossed swords with the then-chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., on the reactor issue and on Johnston's support for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but today Johnston is a Kerry supporter.

Another Kerry cause was eliminating federal subsidies for mohair production. The senator gave speech after speech against the subsidies, which cost taxpayers $60 million a year while creating very few jobs. Kerry got approving editorial coverage in The Boston Globe and The New York Times when the subsidies were phased out in the mid-1990s, but the senator didn't have much to say when the program was revived a few years later. He expressed chagrin, but showed little interest in tackling the issue again. Likewise, he campaigns now against Bush's tax cuts, but he skipped the 2001 vote on those cuts to deliver a commencement address.

Kerry's career stands in sharp contrast to that of his Massachusetts colleague, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., whose Senate achievements were already considerable when he ventured into the presidential race in 1980. But Kennedy lost the nomination to Carter, one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history, and Carter went on to lose to the ultimate outsider -- Ronald Reagan. -- John Maggs

Muscular Dove
Leery of war, solicitous of allies, experienced in Washington, and sometimes fuzzy on "the vision thing." In these key ways, John Kerry is more like George Herbert Walker Bush than George W. Bush is. Kerry's criticisms of the current President Bush on Iraq -- that he raced to war, alienating allies, and that he ended up with no plan and no international help to win the peace -- could have come from Bush I advisers such as Brent Scowcroft, and in fact did.

Kerry's national security issues coordinator, Rand Beers, worked on the National Security Council under Reagan, Bush I, Bill Clinton, and Bush II ("three Republicans, one Democrat," Beers noted) before resigning in protest over Iraq. "The group that is advising Kerry," said Jon Wolfsthal, a former Clinton official and one of those advisers, "is firmly grounded in traditional, internationalist, bipartisan foreign policy."

A veteran-turned-critic of Vietnam, Kerry tries to be a muscular dove: He proposes 40,000 more Army soldiers for future nation building, and warns against "cutting and running" in Iraq. Aides are wary of saying outright that Kerry would increase U.S. forces in Iraq, preferring to highlight his commitment to recruiting international support. (Kerry's "first-hundred-days" plan includes a tour of allied capitals.) Said Beers: "If he is president of the United States, the additional international participation will be available. That's not a campaign slogan. That is a reality."

But all this moderation and nuance sometimes gets fuzzy. Asked point-blank on MSNBC's Hardball, "Are you one of the anti-war candidates?" Kerry replied, confoundingly, "I am, yes, in the sense that I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have." Kerry voted to authorize Bush II to use force against Iraq -- but, he says, only as a last resort after a diplomatic campaign which the administration had appeared to embrace by appealing to the United Nations. Conversely, he voted against Bush I's war to free Kuwait -- but, he says, only because the president needed to take more time to build public support. Understandably, such distinctions are often lost on voters. And in each case, Kerry voted safely with the majority of Democratic senators.

But Beers bristles at the idea that his man is a mere mushy mainstreamer: "You're trying to fit John Kerry in boxes," he protested. To be sure, in one key area, Kerry was well ahead of the mainstream. In leading investigations into the shadowy global webs of the BCCI scandal, the Iran-Contra affair, and the Contra-drugs connection, and in authoring a 1997 book, The New War, "Kerry began focusing on transnational threats -- drugs, terrorism, proliferation -- [years before] 9/11," said Beers. Kerry's anti-money-laundering legislation, a key weapon against terror groups, was incorporated into the USA PATRIOT Act. His plan of attack as president would emphasize international law enforcement and intelligence rather than unilateral military action. Kerry is betting that his nuanced approach will outperform Bush's crusades -- and despite its ambiguities, will resonate with voters. -- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Another Massachusetts Liberal?
The old GOP playbook has already been resurrected. Having successfully painted the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, as an unfeeling technocrat out of the American mainstream, Republicans are taking that theme for a spin on the 2004 campaign trail.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie recently noted that Kerry's voting record is to the left of liberal icon Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., according to a recent rating by the leftist Americans for Democratic Action. "Who would have guessed it?" he asked in a recent speech. "Ted Kennedy is the conservative senator from Massachusetts."

Kerry tries to laugh off such attacks. He told Fox News Sunday on January 25, "As they say in the South, that dog won't hunt." He then ticked off various votes that show he is no automatic liberal. He was a leader in the effort to put 100,000 cops on the streets, for example, and, as a prosecutor, he sent people to jail for life. He was also one of the first Democrats to show concern about government red ink by backing the 1985 Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law. Kerry also supported welfare-reform legislation in 1996 -- a measure that many liberals loathed.

Still, Kerry's record provides plenty of ammunition for critics who charge him with reflexively backing liberal social legislation. They point to his repeated votes against banning so-called "partial birth" abortion; his opposition to the death penalty; his vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman; as well as his support for higher taxes, especially higher gas taxes.

And Kerry's opponents cite his voting record to try to portray him as parroting the liberal Democratic Party line. "Look at National Journal ratings -- Kerry is way to the left of the American mainstream," said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. "He is not another Dukakis. He is as tough a campaigner as anyone will ever find, but he looks and fits the part" of the Massachusetts liberal.

Should Kerry become the Democratic nominee, White House political operatives will undoubtedly shift into overdrive, highlighting various votes throughout Kerry's career to suggest that he is just another Dukakis.

Kerry supporters are quick to respond that the world has changed dramatically and become far more dangerous since the Bush I-Dukakis contest 16 years ago. Digging up decade-old votes to trip an opponent just won't fly, said Robert Gibbs, Kerry's former campaign spokesman. "People are going to take a much fuller measure," he said. -- Kirk Victor

Favorite Of Tree-Huggers
Kerry clearly believes that his environmental record is an asset to his candidacy. He raises green issues at nearly every campaign stop and is known to whip up audiences by attacking Bush's environmental policies. Kerry's campaign platform includes ambitious proposals to speed development of clean-energy and energy-efficient technologies. Linking his energy proposals to national defense issues, Kerry ran an ad pledging that if he is elected, "Never will young Americans in uniform ever be held hostage to America's dependence on oil from the Middle East."

In the Senate, Kerry has worked with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to champion tougher federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, though their efforts have fallen short. Kerry was a leader in the fight against Bush's proposals to permit oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He wants the U.S. to re-enter international discussions to control the pollutants that are causing climate change, although he says he would renegotiate the United Nations' Kyoto agreement.

Kerry's consistent support for environmental issues won him the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters, a key player in the environmental community's political arm. The endorsement, which irritated other pro-environment Democratic candidates, was partly based on Kerry's high ranking in the group's annual congressional voting scorecard, according to League President Deb Callahan. "These are personal hallmark issues for Kerry," she said. "This gives us the opportunity to use these primaries to start our organizing for the general election." The league rallied environmental volunteers for Kerry in New Hampshire and plans to send activists to other early primary states, most notably Florida, Michigan, New Mexico, and Wisconsin.

If Kerry wins the Democratic nomination, his candidacy will add fuel to a long-simmering debate over the power of environmental issues to sway U.S. voters. Environmental activists insist that air-pollution and water-quality concerns can help galvanize important blocs of swing voters. Conservatives and industry lobbyists contend that green issues play little or no role in voters' choices and, in fact, they say, pro-environment positions can easily be portrayed as costing U.S. jobs.

Energy-industry lobbyist Scott Segal argues that Kerry's push for stricter fuel-efficiency standards in cars and tougher air-pollution restrictions on coal-fired power plants might hurt his chances with voters in some regions. "Folks from Michigan or Kentucky or Alabama, where there are a large number of autoworkers, might look askance at his car fuel-efficiency proposals," Segal suggested.

Critics say that although Kerry's strong environmental positions may play well in New England and in a handful of states elsewhere, they will hurt him in a national campaign. "I think his appeal west of the Adirondacks to the general electorate is significantly less than that of Michael Dukakis," said Myron Ebell, an analyst with the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. "He has a lot of left-wing baggage, particularly on the environment."

Kerry's proposals to crack down on energy companies and to protect federal lands could also energize Bush's core business supporters and attract more industry money to the Republican campaign. As an oil-industry lobbyist put it: "John Kerry isn't a friend of the industry." -- Margaret Kriz

This Is Your Life
Some commentators say that Kerry's campaign received a final, needed boost in Iowa when a man whose life he saved nearly 35 years ago in Vietnam called the senator's staff out of the blue and flew from Oregon to Des Moines for an emotional reunion with Kerry just two days before the caucuses convened.

That moment in the campaign "probably propelled him to victory" in Iowa, said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "It was real. Kerry is often accused of being aloof and phony, but that was real. You can't manufacture those kinds of circumstances."

Kerry's experience in Vietnam, where he served two tours of duty as a naval officer, has clearly had a major impact on his life and will surely pack a wallop in a campaign in which national security and the military figure so prominently. He received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts -- and he returned home to become one of the most outspoken anti-war protesters as a founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

Still, Sabato sounded a cautionary note: The Vietnam experience "can only carry you so far," he said. "Remember, people under 40 really don't remember Vietnam." Similarly, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who also served bravely in the war, told National Journal last year that Kerry "served with courage and valor, and all Americans respect that. But I have advised John that I'd be very careful about how much you talk about that, because you don't want it to sound self-serving. Let other people talk about it."

Kerry has repeatedly sounded populist themes on the campaign trail, noting that as a former district attorney in Massachusetts and as a senator, he has taken on special interests. But that image may be a difficult sell, as some opponents try to make the case that the notion of "Kerry, the Crusader for the Little Guy" is difficult to square with the senator's privileged background.

Kerry's mother came from the wealthy, Boston Brahmin Forbes family, and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is a multimillionaire. Kerry is an alumnus of Yale University and Yankee prep schools.

"I've been misunderstood for having come from a comfortable background," Kerry wrote in his book, A Call to Service. "That is certainly true, but it was a background built on a foundation of duty and service, which my family considered a responsibility."

In February 2003, The Boston Globe discovered that Kerry's paternal grandfather was Jewish. That was news to Kerry. Globe columnist Joan Vennochi wrote, "Kerry's confusion about his heritage mirrors a larger confusion about his essence: Who is he? What does he believe in?"

His resume also records his service from 1982 to 1984 as lieutenant governor under Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee who was trounced by George H.W. Bush in 1988. On the medical front, Kerry had surgery for prostate cancer about a year ago. He quickly returned to the campaign trail. -- Kirk Victor

A Tax-Cut-And-Spend Liberal
With a 19-year record of votes for Democratic budget priorities, Kerry is both the biggest tax-and-spend liberal in the primary race and the one with the best record of fiscal conservatism. "I am a Republican, and I'm not going to vote for him," said former Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, on the eve of that state's primary. "But John Kerry has a very distinguished record as a fiscal conservative."

Yet the dynamics of the Democratic primary have led Kerry to emphasize spending and the preservation of most of the Bush tax cuts over the kind of fiscal conservatism that often distinguished him from many Democrats in the Senate.

Like the other Democrats in the presidential race, Kerry says that budget deficits under President Bush are hurting the economy, but he's thus far shown little inclination to avoid the kind of new spending ideas that are popular with voters. Kerry's economic plan consists of higher federal spending and more tax credits, but no commitment that these measures be offset by higher taxes. Unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who committed months ago to repealing all of Bush's $2 trillion in tax cuts, Kerry wants to preserve the cuts for most Americans -- all but those who earn $200,000 a year or more. Kerry's campaign hasn't crunched the numbers, but additional revenue from wealthy Americans likely would not cover all of the spending in his economic plan, which includes $5 billion in aid to state government, $5 billion in additional spending on homeland security, a broad tax credit for college and graduate school, and a corporate tax credit that would allow manufacturers to receive two years of rebates of the Social Security taxes they pay for newly hired workers. Kerry has not addressed the fact that this rebate would effectively draw down on a Social Security surplus that is now keeping the budget deficit from looking much worse.

At the same time, Kerry used the final debate before New Hampshire to tout his record on tax cuts: " I have voted for countless numbers of tax cuts. When I arrived in the United States Senate, the highest marginal rate was 72 percent. We took it down to 28 percent under Ronald Reagan. It then went back up somewhat. I voted for cutting the capital gains tax." Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for a Democratic presidential candidate to invoke Ronald Reagan and brag about capital gains cuts.

Joe Lieberman often gets credit as the truest fiscal conservative in the primary field, but Kerry has him beat in one respect. In late 1985, when soaring deficits drove Rudman and then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to push for unprecedented limits on spending, an unknown John Kerry, in his first year in the Senate, became the second Democrat to support the Gramm-Rudman bill (the first was Ernest Hollings of South Carolina). "Kerry's support was very important," said Rudman. "He cleared the way for a lot of other Democrats to support it." Kerry led the way by demanding and receiving a commitment that Social Security would be exempted, and he helped persuade an additional 25 Democrats to support the bill, including the senior senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy. -- John Maggs

Yankee Reserve, Or Just Plain Aloof?
Put in the words "aloof" and "Kerry" in a Nexis search, and you'll turn up a list of 149 articles in just the past month. Kerry has been so stung by repeated potshots along these lines that he addresses the matter head-on in his book, A Call to Service.

"Some political insiders have called me aloof over the years," he wrote. "I have a feeling that my spending not one weekend in Washington for more than 17 years may have something to do with that label. I'm not aloof at all with the colleagues, friends, and constituents I have spent time with when I'm away from Washington."

Kerry's former campaign spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said that he "fought this [characterization] a lot during my time with the campaign. You simply don't get elected lieutenant governor and senator from the same state, and get such a huge number of votes in a place as notoriously retail as Iowa, and somehow be aloof."

But not many of those who follow the Senate see the New Englander as especially warm or outgoing. When asked about Kerry's success in Iowa, Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor of politics, was dismissive. "He was connecting with a very small, ideologically distinct group of Iowans who were focused on beating George Bush on specific issues, and they were able to put check marks next to Kerry on all the critical matters," Sabato said. "I don't think he was chosen because they liked him and certainly not because they loved him, but because they thought he had the right image, the right persona, and all the rest."

Similarly, Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, suggested that Kerry's dour persona is a big contrast to the bright smile that Kerry's rival, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., always wears. "He has the same flinty quality that Ed Muskie had in 1972," he said, referring to the late senator and presidential candidate from Maine. "Kerry is not quick to smile.... He is what he is -- a reserved person. He will rise or fall on the strength of his resume and message, and he's not going to get a very big boost from his smiling and winning personality." -- Kirk Victor

Spousal Support
Teresa Heinz Kerry is a woman whose identity as wife, mother of three sons, U.S. citizen, and wealthy heiress and philanthropist is derived from a politician, but not the one to whom she is now married. The politician who gave her a place in American life was John Heinz, the moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania who died in a plane crash in 1991. The two met in Geneva when Heinz was a graduate student and she was attending a school for interpreters. (The daughter of a Portuguese doctor, she was then known as Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira.) With Kerry, whom she married in 1995, her persona as widow, benefactor with a vast ketchup fortune, and reliably outspoken observer of world conditions gives her a platform all her own.

That is a plus for Kerry, who literally embraces his wife (they often hug and hold hands along the campaign trail) as a campaign asset. Teresa, he told The Washington Post in 2002, "raises things up a little bit." But Theresa Heinz Kerry (who changed her political party affiliation and her name to help her husband) is also a woman who feels strongly enough about "truth" to become a curiosity from time to time. She says what she thinks. Period. At 65 (five years older than her husband), she is intelligent, charming, a tad self-absorbed, and fiercely proud of her reputation as an original. She is not reluctant to spar with Kerry, and she's unapologetic if the world catches those glimpses of their partnership.

"I don't want to be perfect, I want to be engaged," she told The Post for the 2002 article. "But that makes a lot of people uncomfortable."

Even, sometimes, her husband -- when he has to field media inquiries about his wife's candor. ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman asked Kerry this month, "Does this help you? Does it hurt you?" He replied: "I don't care about it. I mean, I'm not going to worry about it. She's my wife. She is who she is. I love her for her outspokenness, and I think it's kind of charming and honest, and I think people like honesty."

There is nothing in the body of political research to suggest that voters select presidential candidates based on their feelings about their spouses, but many do size up the potential "first family" as part of a package. For that reason, campaigns make "strategic use of the spouse," says Lisa Caputo, the former White House spokeswoman for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had her own close encounters with candor during her husband's 1992 campaign. (Remember the "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" exchange?) How a campaign uses a spouse depends on the image the candidate wishes to project. "They are a window into the life and world of the candidate," Caputo said, and in Theresa Kerry's case, "she seems to resonate quite well along the campaign trail. She's a net positive." -- Alexis Simendinger

Kerry's K Street
In his dealings with a wide swath of special interests over the years, Kerry has displayed a quiet independent streak toward several powerful industries, but he has also shown a willingness to build close ties to some industries and lobbyists.

During his Senate career, Kerry has irked segments of K Street on various occasions: He has co-sponsored legislation that would mandate higher fuel-efficiency standards for autos, including gas-guzzling SUVs; rejected contributions from political action committees; and generally backed the expensing of stock options. Kerry, who teamed with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on the unsuccessful fuel-efficiency effort, has also worked with the Arizonan on other bills that have riled corporate lobbyists. One example: a measure that would terminate dozens of inequitable corporate subsidies. A lobbyist calls Kerry, who sits on the Senate Finance panel and the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, a leader in this area with "constructive ideas."

Kerry has also weighed in with his own bill to curb tax loopholes. A Kerry-sponsored bill in the 107th Congress would have required tax-avoidance strategies to serve a legitimate business purpose; it also would have tightened rules for transactions with so-called "tax-haven" countries. "I think he's had some generally good ideas about tax shelters," says Don Alexander, a tax lobbyist with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. "But a few others on the [Finance] Committee have been more aggressive in attempting to remedy what they see as bad."

Notwithstanding his generally liberal posture and his efforts to claim the political high ground, Kerry has also been a prodigious fundraiser who has at times championed legislation that's been pushed by special interests and law and lobbying firms that have been generous Kerry contributors. Kerry has been particularly supportive of the wireless telecom sector. According to a May 2003 study by the Center for Public Integrity, Kerry has sponsored and co-sponsored several bills that track the priorities of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. The CTIA is represented by the Boston firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, the leading donor to the senator. Kerry's former Chief of Staff David Leiter also lobbies for ML Strategies, a Mintz, Levin affiliate, and Kerry's brother Cameron is a litigator with the firm. Kerry's office has said that the senator's actions were based on "sound policy and what is best for the people he represents," according to the newly published book The Buying of the President 2004, by Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity.

Kerry's career has also been blemished somewhat by a few fundraising lapses. For instance, during his 1996 campaign, he accepted $8,000 from Johnny Chung, who later was found guilty of illegally funneling more than $350,000 through so-called "straw donors" to the Democratic Party. Kerry returned the money he received from Chung. -- Peter H. Stone

Social Divide
Social issues are not merely moral, aesthetic, or private concerns. They're debates about the government's influence over self-governance by people, families, and communities. These issues have proved powerful enough to turn some voters into Democrats and others into Republicans.

On the issue of abortion, Republicans have already highlighted that Kerry has voted at least five times against bans on "partial-birth" abortion. Kerry seeks to parry this criticism by saying that while he personally opposes "partial-birth" abortion, his votes were intended to allow the procedure if a pregnancy posed a threat to the woman of a "grievous bodily injury."

Kerry also seeks to straddle the growing debate over the legal status of gays and lesbians. He told Fox News, "I don't support gay marriage ... [but] I do support rights. I support equality." In interviews, Kerry combines this defense with charges that Republicans have engaged in "gay-bashing [and] discriminatory efforts to try to drive wedges between the American people."

Kerry's position is complicated by his 1996 vote against "The Defense of Marriage Act," the bill that declared that no state need accept another state's decision to extend the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. The salience of Kerry's vote has risen sharply since November, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court voted 4-3 to direct the state to open marriage to gays and lesbians. This legal breakthrough will give gay-rights groups the opportunity this summer and fall to sue other states for recognition of gays' marriages in Massachusetts.

Accused of "gay-bashing," President Bush is trying to shift the focus from a claim of legal rights for homosexuals toward a debate over democratic decision-making: "On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard," he declared in his January 20 State of the Union speech. "If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process."

Especially in the critical Midwest swing states, "Reagan Democrats, the Catholics, are not going to be supportive of someone [Kerry] ... who supports same-sex marriage," predicted Genevieve Wood, vice president for communications at the conservative Family Research Council.

But Winnie Stachelberg, political director of the Human Rights Campaign, the Washington-based gay-advocacy group, argues that the issue will not push swing voters toward Bush or Kerry. "It's the people in the middle who are not moved by it at all, but would rather be talking about the economy, terrorism, and our troops in Iraq," she said. -- Neil Munro

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