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."