HERE COMES CHRIS LEHANE, WITH A HATCHET:

Rivals Mine Kerry Senate Years For Material to Slow Him Down (TODD S. PURDUM, January 25, 2004, NY Times)

Now that his opponents are moving even more aggressively to slow Mr. Kerry's rise, his 19-year voting record as the junior senator from Massachusetts could loom as his greatest political vulnerability, among Democrats and Republicans alike. The sheer length of Mr. Kerry's service means that he has built a paper trail of positions on education, the military, intelligence and other issues — stands that might have looked one way when he took them but that resonate differently now.

For example, at the end of the cold war, Mr. Kerry advocated scaling back the Central Intelligence Agency, but after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he complained about a lack of intelligence capability. In the 1980's, he opposed the death penalty for terrorists who killed Americans abroad, but he now supports the death penalty for terrorist acts. In the 1990's, he joined with Republican colleagues to sponsor proposals to end tenure for public school teachers and allow direct grants to religion-based charities, measures that many Democratic groups opposed. In 1997, he voted to require elderly people with higher incomes to pay a larger share of Medicare premiums.

The record is susceptible to two broad strands of attack. Mr. Kerry's rival Democrats point to a series of shifting stands on issues, like his qualified praise for the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and his vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. They say these are are at odds with his campaign claim to be the "real deal" Democratic alternative to Mr. Bush, capable of "standing up for people and taking on powerful interests," as he says in his stump speech.

"When it was popular to be a Massachusetts liberal, his voting record was that," said Jay Carson, a Dean campaign spokesman. "When it was popular to be for the Iraq war, he was for it. Now it's popular to be against it, and he's against it. This is a voting record that is a big vulnerability against Republicans in the general election. He's all over the place on this stuff."

By contrast, the Republicans seek to paint Mr. Kerry as voting in lock step with, or even to the left of, his fellow Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, long a Republican target and a perennial party fund-raising bugbear.

There's a reason congressmen don't become presidents.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2004 4:18 PM