Newsweek on Kerry's senate record - good article

[stray cat]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6262620/site/newsweek/

Oct. 25 issue - It's one of John Kerry's biggest achievements in the Senate: a groundbreaking investigation into money laundering, drug dealers, terrorists and secret nukes. Yet voters have rarely heard of the senator's dogged inquiries into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Why? Because some of Kerry's leading campaign strategists believed it was too difficult for voters to digest. "You can't talk about that because people think you're talking about the BBC," Bob Shrum, Kerry's top adviser, told one senior staffer. "Why were you investigating British TV?"

From the moment he entered the Senate as an ambitious 41-year-old, Kerry eschewed the clubby corridors of the lawmakers, where colleagues like Ted Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts, cast a long shadow. Instead, the younger Kerry preferred the crime-busting culture of his previous life as a prosecutor and the investigative spirit of the Vietnam and Watergate era. He delved deep into the lives of narco traffickers, gun runners and rogue spies. And along the way, he also nurtured his intellectual love of foreign policy—where senators pass few laws and bring home no bacon.

To Bush, Kerry's record is both inconsistent and "out of the mainstream." That depends on what you call the mainstream. Judging by his allies in the Senate, he looks more like a maverick than a mainstream politician. Kerry has worked closely with the right-wing Jesse Helms, become best buddies with the socially conservative McCain and found a Democratic mentor in Fritz Hollings of South Carolina—the cultural opposite of the Northeastern liberal. In the final count, the holes in Kerry's record may be more a question of style than a matter of than substance. "John would never come and jump on your piece of legislation or elbow you to a press conference or steal your idea or fail to give you credit—things that are rampant in this place," says Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on Kerry's foreign-relations committee. "He's classy."

[NMDemDist2]

1. another good article on Newsweek's site

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6263236/site/newsweek/

Oct. 25 issue - At bottom, elections involving incumbents are always about rehiring or summarily firing the president. The voters are like shareholders in a messy proxy fight. They have to examine how current management is handling the country's business, then make a tough-minded decision about performance.

Even if comparisons between industry and government are inexact, it's fitting that Bush's performance be subjected to the type of rigorous review that, say, Jack Welch might undertake. This is a language that Bush understands. He is the first M.B.A. (Harvard, 1975) and the first former CEO and corporate board member to become president.


So let's dispassionately assess the president's record in six categories: risk management, finance, international operations, plant security, human resources and strategic planning.

[pacalo]

2. Kerry just continues to look better & better! I'm totally smitten!

[Demeter]

3. BCCI Is SO 80's

And it was suborned, co-opted and obscured by Reagan's robots. What about recent events?