What Would a Kerry Presidency Be Like?

July 28, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. ORNSTEIN:  I'm Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.  Here, my co-podium person is Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution, and we are proud, along with NDI, to sponsor this session on how John Kerry would govern.

It's actually the second one of these we've done.  We were also there four years ago at the convention in Los Angeles and I'm sure some of you were here for a panel that also included Ed Markey who will be joining us very shortly.

We're going to be doing a series of these sessions on how John Kerry and George Bush would govern, in the latter case, of course, if he has a second term, around the country, at the Republican convention as well, at the debate in Miami, and in other places, and we're very grateful for the support of the Knight Foundation to make this possible.

We believe that a focus on governing is extremely important, and looking at the shape of politics and policy in the country, and what we can learn about the candidates from their backgrounds and experiences and putting it into a political context to see what the governing climate would be like, and how things would work over the succeeding four years is an extremely important thing to do and we are very, very fortunate to have with us quite a remarkable group of people.

Let me introduce our panelists, looking at them from proximity to me.

First, we have Jim Shannon.  Jim Shannon is a native of Methuen, Massachusetts, earned his bachelor's degree in political science at Johns Hopkins University and his law degree at George Washington University, served in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 1985, where he was on the Ways and Means Committee and a rising star.

Then ran for the Senate against--what was his name?--John Kerry, in 1984.  Moved into law practice and became attorney general of Massachusetts in 1987 for several years, and is currently president and CEO of the National Fire Protection Association.

Kent Conrad came to the United States Senate in 1986 and has been reelected four times.  He is a fifth generation North Dakotan and was born in Bismarck, began his political career in 1968 where he headed up a campaign, statewide, to grant voting rights to 19-year-olds.

He first got elected in 1980, statewide, as North Dakota tax commissioner, reelected in 1984 with 79 percent of the votes.  North Dakota, in a larger national sense, is one of the most Republican states in the country and that tells you something for a Democrat in that state.  The dynamism of Kent won a Senate seat in 1986 in a huge upset, actually, at the time, and has no trouble ever since.

He has a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and an MBA from George Washington University.

Michael Kranish is a veteran reporter for the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe and is also co-author of a new book, John Kerry, The Complete Biography, by the Boston Globe reporters who know him best, which is a thorough account of Kerry's life and career and, among other things, Michael unearthed information that was stunning news to John Kerry, about the background of his father and grandfather. through a great deal of diligent reporting.

Jack Farrell is the Washington bureau chief of the Denver Post, who is also the author of a magisterial biography of Tip O'Neill called Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century.  He was Washington editor of the Boston Globe.  He's covered national affairs for a number of years.

And Ed Markey, who I expect will join us momentarily, is the dean of the Massachusetts delegation in the House of Representatives, serving in his 14th term from the 7th District.  He is also third in seniority among Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee.  He has been the  nation's leader on telecommunications policy and the Internet for a long time.

He also is a leader in the energy area, the senior Democrat on the Resources Committee and is on the Select Committee on Homeland Security where he deals with intelligence, counterterrorism, and infrastructure, and of course a leader among House Democrats.

Just a couple of ground rules for the panel.  We expect you to show us enormous wisdom but we want you to combine that with strength because they're not competing values.  And discussion may get heated from time to time.  If you use a bad word, you will have a time out.  It may not be a time out for four years but there will be a time out.

So let me turn to Tom Mann.

MR. MANN:  Well, Norman, Thank you very much.  Our plan is to begin by looking at John Kerry here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts roughly between the period, 1970 through the 1984 election which brought him to Washington as a member of the U.S. Senate.  Our goal here is to see what we can learn about John Kerry, his motivation, what drives him to be a politician and to seek higher office.

His temperament.  What can we learn from that?  His beliefs and ideologies.  His style of leadership and style as a politician, and maybe perhaps even something about his friends and his enemies and what we might learn about him from that.

John Kerry's initial venture into elective office began really in 1970 when he looked at that Democratic nomination for a House seat but the then dean of the Boston College law school, Father Robert Drinan, was clearly the favorite.  But Norm, my explanation for why Drinan won that so handily is that he had the best bumper sticker.  I don't know how many of you remember the bumper sticker but it said, "Vote for Drinan or go to hell."

Well, John Kerry then ran seriously in 1972, winning the Democratic nomination but losing the general election to Republican Paul Kronan and his budding political career was nipped.  He went to law school.  He became chief deputy district attorney.  He practiced law.  He looked at another House contest in 1980 but deferred to Barney Frank, and ultimately got himself nominated and elected as lieutenant governor in '82 and then to the Senate in '84.

So my initial question to Jim Shannon, if I may, is how should we think about John Kerry during this period?  He seemed to always be the candidate who did not have the endorsement of the party, who ran out--is John Kerry fundamentally an outsider?

MR. SHANNON:  I think if you're focusing on his political biography, is a very good place to begin, because I think that there is a lot of mythology about John Kerry and how he proceeded in politics, that has been bought into by people around the country, that will be debunked during the campaign and serves to obscure some of his strengths as a candidate for President and I think as a potential President.

There is a notion out there that John Kerry, you know, had this golden elevator political career, that he burst on to the national scene in 1970 as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans against the war, and that that sort of picked him to proceed with a political career, he was a natural, and it's been sort of a seamless move ever since then, when, in fact, as you pointed out, his first attempt at public office came in 1970 and he never achieved public office until 1982.

So he spent 12 years in getting knocked on his rear end politically in this state, again and again, two or three times, trying to get a foothold toward public office, and I think that he is a much stronger and a better self-defined politician than he is given credit for being.

I think that his early experiences as a leader of Vietnam Veterans against the war, and then as a candidate for public office, opposing the war in Vietnam, there has been a consistency of John Kerry wanting to run in races as an outsider, not as part of the political establishment but as a reformer, as somebody who is coming into a situation that he can change, not as somebody who is going to continue a tradition but somebody who is coming into a situation saying this is a situation where we really desperately need to see change and I'm the person who can do it, and I think that that part of his persona, his definition of who he is, is particularly well-suited for a campaign against an incumbent President and the premise of his campaign has been and will be that the country is moving in the wrong direction, he's the guy who could change it, and that is a consistent posture that he has had throughout his whole political career.

MR. MANN:  Jack, what would you add to that?  What do we learn from John Kerry the person and the politician in this period from the high point, if you will, of the leadership of the antiwar movement, then setbacks in seeking elective office, and then the long road back?  What do we learn about him?

MR. FARRELL:  Well, listening to Jim, I was thinking, boy, I hope I don't have to follow him because that's just about the perfect explanation of Kerry career.  But I'll give it a shot.

I think one of the interesting things that Jim had to skip over with that, sort of the ruthless ambition that drove Kerry in those years, that was sort of mixed also with a very personal and ideological belief that the Vietnam situation had to be changed, and in fact over the years he developed a very strong reputation within the left wing of the Massachusetts party because he was this person who was willing to come back in a uniform and go against the war.

An awful lot of the antiwar protesters, as Bill Clinton pointed out the other night, did not serve, and to have a soldier come back and validate their position and stand, or sit in front of the Foreign Relations Committee and testify like that, really earned him a spot in the Massachusetts liberal community that I think, in trying to figure out why he was successful all these years, was that he always could fall back on that, and throughout his career he will always fall back on Vietnam, as you've seen in the last three days and you'll see again tonight.

It is by far the defining experience of his life.  But he went there in part because he as ambitious, because he wanted to emulate his idol, John F. Kennedy.

I wouldn't be surprised, although I'm not sure that even Michael has found out yet, whether or not he volunteered for the Swift boat duty because he wanted to be in a little boat just like Kennedy was in a torpedo boat.

But then he came back and he did something that Kennedy I don't think would ever have done, which is that he handled his first, not his first race cause 1970 was his first race--but he handled his second race very badly, and he was so eager personally, he had gotten so much attention it went to his head, and inside him, for many personal and reasons of ambition, he really burned to stop this war, and came back to Massachusetts and just made a hash of it, moved around through several districts, trying to find a place that was, would be a comfortable, easy win for him, settled but got the reputation as just an opportunistic guy, and that tells you a little something about his ambition.

The other thing about this period of exile is that like Nixon and many other great politicians, he had the ability to withstand and go through the years of exile and still come back again and win a race.

I mean, I think that it's very easy to run and to lose.  To run, lose, be humiliated in the loss, go out into the wilderness and come back again, really says an awful lot about the drive that he had.

MR. MANN:  Michael.  Thank you, Jack.  Give us a little of the sort of insider/outsider perspective in Massachusetts politics.  Did, over time, he make his peace with the party in Massachusetts and become as much a player with them as someone who challenged from the outside?

MR. KRANISH:  You know, he's still, in some ways, seen a little bit as an outsider.  In the book we tell the story about how he's not--he was assumed to be an Irish American and this turned out to be not the case, and, you know, that may have helped him a little bit politically in Massachusetts.

What really interests me is--and the title of this is how he'd govern, and I'm struck by the fact that some things that he learned when he was four years old influenced the way he thinks today.  How could that be, four years old?  Well, let me just tell you a short story.

When John Kerry was four years old, his mother returned to their house in France.  His mother had, Rosemary Forbes had grown up on the Brittany coast of France, and in World War II the Nazis had come and had taken over the house of John Kerry's mother.  They used this house as the ideal lookout over the seas because they expected an invasion.

And Rosemary Forbes fled by bicycle to Paris and fled to this country and married Richard Kerry who was John Kerry's father.  Then John Kerry was born and when John Kerry was about four years old, he returned with his mother to the home in France.  The U.S. forces had come and obviously kicked out the Nazis.  The Nazis, in retreat, had destroyed the house.  So when John Kerry arrives there, all that his mother sees is the stairway into the sky, to use John Kerry's phrase, the shards of glass are on the ground, there's bunkers around, there's still mines.

And so John Kerry learns the lesson that the U.S. military can be a force for good, for greatness.  Imagine if your mother's house had been rescued by the U.S. military.

So I think this plays into why John Kerry then felt, in addition to the fact that his father had been in the Army Air Corps and the Foreign Service, why John Kerry felt it was important to volunteer for Vietnam, and he did volunteer to serve there with the idea in mind of hearing John Kennedy's call for serving your country and what he'd seen with his mother, and his father in the Foreign Service and so forth.

He did not, however, think he was going to see big combat duty.  In fact although he volunteered for Swift boats, Jack mentioned this, he did not think that this would be close-in combat.  He thought they'd be off the coast of Vietnam, and then just before he got to Vietnam the mission changed, and while he was in Vietnam, instead of seeing the U.S. as a force for good, as it was in his mother's case, he became concerned and convinced, really, that the U.S. was not welcomed by a lot of Vietnamese and became convinced over a short period of time, four and a half months of combat, that the U.S. was not really wanted, that the war was wrong, and that in this case the U.S. should not be there.

So he has these two great countervailing lessons in his life of World War II and his own personal experience in Vietnam, and I think even today, as he decides what to do about Iraq, these two lessons are central to his beliefs.

Should the U.S. go in?  Will the U.S. be welcomed?  And he's got this--he's sort of torn, in some cases, between duty to country and doubt about the country's mission, and I think that's part of what happened in the 2002 Iraq war vote.  He felt this duty.

He describes himself--there he is now calling, complaining about what I'm saying!

MR.     :  I apologize.

MR. KRANISH:  So he describes himself in his own book called A Call To Service, as an internationalist, because he does want to work with other countries.  He sees what happened in World War II as the model and then what happened in Vietnam as not the model, and then he's struck by what happened in Iraq.

So that brings us up to today and explains why some of what he learned as a 4-year-old--I didn't really answer your question but--

MR. MANN:  No.

MR. KRANISH:  But nice story.

MR. MANN:  Michael, you said--I mean he obviously volunteered, when he didn't have to, for Vietnam service, but he wasn't looking for combat, the glories of combat, but he found himself in it and by most accounts acted instinctively and rather heroically in battle.

One, is that accurate? and two, does that give us any hint of the kind of leader he would be?

MR. KRANISH:  Right.  He called his draft board when he was at Yale University and he asked basically, will I be drafted?  Yes, you will.  Okay.  Well, if I'm going to be drafted--then he decided he'd rather volunteer to serve as an officer because he thought that would provide good leadership training.  A lot his friends, even when John Kerry was 16, 17, 18 years old, saw John Kerry as a political leader and a potential president.

One of his friends told me a couple a days ago that 40 years ago, he introduced John Kerry to his mother, and said this is Johnny Kerry, he's going to be President of the United States one day.

And that is not atypical.  A lot of his friends from as far back as then saw that and it was this whole JFK thing, the initials are the same, and he, you know, just idolized John  Kennedy.  We can talk more about that, if you like.

So when he volunteered for service in Vietnam, he didn't think he'd see combat.  He did volunteer for the Swift boat duty.  He did get three Purple Hearts for very minor wounds.  Two were not, didn't keep him out of service at all, one put him out for a day, not to dump on that at all.  I mean, obviously, they were minor wounds.  But he also won the Silver Star and the Bronze Star.

At four and a half months, because he had gotten three Purple Hearts, he left.  Instead of staying for a year, he left after four and a half months, he says because he decided he was able to and because he wanted to tell the story about the war back home in this country.

So it was a relatively short but very intense time of service.  His crew mates called it the "days of hell" because almost every day they were under fire.  It turned out to be one of the most dangerous missions in the Navy.

But I think the reason he's known today is not because necessarily what he did in the war, that's what they're talking about, but his antiwar status.  That's how he became famous.  He delivered the famous address, some of you probably are familiar with, in 1971, April, where he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a committee that he would later join as a senator, and he asked, How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Now of course some of the antiwar people today are asking him, Well, how can you keep this war in Iraq going, if it's a mistake? you know, turning his own phrase against him.  So he's in a different position today.  He can't just simply be there as the critic, telling the leadership what to do.

He sees himself as the leader, can't be quite as volatile, can't offend everybody, he's trying to reach out to it, to a great mass of people.  So he's got to temper his language, temper his ideology, to a degree.

MR. MANN:  But the time in Vietnam was brief but it was striking.  I guess the question I'm asking is, have you, in the course of this research--and Jack, you should weigh in as well--do we learn something about Kerry the man from his combat experience, not his subsequent antiwar leadership, that gives us any hints of how he might act in a crisis in the White House?

MR. KRANISH:  What struck me about Kerry in Vietnam is that one of his closest friends was killed in combat before he even got to Vietnam and the letters he writes home about this death, he talks from the beginning, before he set a foot on shore in Vietnam, about how he thought the war was a great waste, this death is a great waste.

And so from the beginning he had these doubts.  These doubts began to develop as he saw what the mission was and yet, under fire with his crew, he still was able to instinctively and quite courageously, and with very good instincts, since they all came home alive, do what was necessary to win that day's battle, keep them alive, win the particular altercation, and so that suggests to me a considerably complicated but also an admirable personality, in that if you have doubts about this mission and yet you're surrounded by your crew mates, and you know that you have to act to preserve them, and you're willing to do it courageously, that's a cut above what maybe somebody else might have done if they had doubts about the mission and decided the best thing to do, you know, punch the clock, get in, do the tour of the river and get out real quick.

To have gone there with doubts about the war and to have won those medals for bravery I think is something significant to think about.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Jim, let me bring the focus back to Massachusetts and Kerry.  Starting around 1970, you had quite an extraordinary collection of young, ambitious, remarkable talent in the Democratic Party, looking forward.

You had Paul Tsongas, you had Michael Dukakis, you, Ed Markey, Barney Frank, just a whole lotta people looking to move ahead.  It must have been a rather sharp elbow contact sport from that point forward.

Talk for a couple of minutes about when you first met John Kerry, what you kind of saw in him then, and carry it through just a little bit to your own contact with him in that Senate race.

MR. SHANNON:  Well, I should say I first met him when I volunteered to work in his congressional campaign in 1972, because he was running in the district that I lived in and for the seat that I subsequently held, and of course when John Kerry ran for that seat, I think that the characterization that was made of him at that period is an accurate one.  He sort of landed in the district, running on the basis of his national reputation.

Frankly, I think he was sort of adopted and surrounded by a group of people who were completely motivated by his eloquence as a anti-Vietnam crusader.  That's certainly what attracted me to his candidacy in 1972.  But running for office for the first time is a very difficult experience for everybody, and I think it was particularly difficult for him because he came in with such, you know, high expectations, and with so much national support, and sort of getting his feet on the ground and doing the things you need to do in order to be a successful grassroots politician, I think was a very, very difficult experience for him.

I won't say it was an embittering experience for him because it wasn't, but it was a tremendous educational experience for him.

He went, having won a split primary, I think there were ten candidates in that year in the primary, and he was able to win with a relatively small percentage of the vote, had a huge lead against the candidate, a Republican candidate that nobody thought could win.  I think the Boston Globe had him up 24 points or something, two or three weeks before the election, and then lost resoundingly on election day because of a brutal pasting that he took, particularly from one of the local newspapers in the district.  The Lowell Sun, which, forgive me, Michael, a lot more people in the district read than read the Boston Globe at that time.

So I think it was a very, very difficult experience.  The fact that he didn't just walk away from politics at the end of that and say I don't want any part of this again, tells you an awful lot about John Kerry, and not just his ambition, because I think your point is right, Norm.

I get a kick outta the fact that, you know, Kerry is criticized for being so ambitious.  All of us are ambitious.  Anybody who succeeds in politics is ambitious and all of the names that you mention, everybody wears it a little bit different.  Paul Tsongas, Michael Dukakis, Ed Markey, myself--we're all different personalities, but by normal standards, I think we would be viewed as being pretty high on the ambition scale and I don't think John Kerry's any different from successful politicians in that regard.

I think he gets tagged for it a little bit more than others do but I don't think that quality about Kerry is any different than any other successful politician.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Ed, let me--I want to follow up with a similar question.  What I mentioned was that back around 1970, you had this extraordinary collection of talent from Tsongas to Dukakis to you to Jim, to Barney Frank, in the Democratic Party, almost, in many ways, competing against one another from time to time.

A number of them following in the footsteps of Father Drinan from Boston College law school, like you, and Kerry.  When did you first meet Kerry in this context and how was he in that sharp-elbowed atmosphere?

MR. MARKEY:  Well, I actually met him in 1975.  He was an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County, which is the largest county in Massachusetts, and he worked with my brother John, who was an assistant district attorney at that time.  So it's almost 30 years ago that I met him, and interestingly, when I ran for Congress in 1976, in a 12-way race, 28 years ago, John Kerry actually called me up, we went out, we had a nice meeting, and he had stored all of his desks and all of his chairs, and whatever from the 1972 campaign, that Jim was just talking about, that he lost, and so he asked me if I would like to use all of his desks and chairs.

MR.     :  At a discount rate?

MR. MARKEY:  Well, it was a--when you're starting up a campaign, you have nothing, and so that was a unsolicited generous act in a 12-way primary with me at about seventh or eighth in terms of people's prospects of thinking I was going to win at the time.

So that was my first real encounter with them, but it was primarily through my brother John, and this career that he had as a prosecutor.  What people really don't focus on is that he went to Boston College law school for three years.  Almost everyone here thinks he went to Yale law school.  He went to Boston College law school and then he had four or five years as a prosecutor.

So there's seven or eight years of his life as a very top local prosecutor and that's really how I got to know him.

MR. MANN:  Kent, if I could bring you in here, that period of time that Ed just mentioned, working for the DA, organizing that office, expanding it, managing a staff but also doing some prosecutions.

Does that give us a window at all on the kind of senator that John Kerry became?

SENATOR CONRAD:  I think it does.  I think it provides a very revealing window in the sense that what I find with John is that he is smart, he is tough, and he is disciplined, and when you're dealing with him on an issue, his prosecutorial skills come very much to the fore.

I remember being involved in a series of very complex, very arcane issues, that I won't go into here, but I remember dealing over a period of weeks with John in meetings that were very detailed.

There was a question of environmental regulation, and he was so persistent and sharp in his questioning, and, you know, he wasn't interested in just the first order of facts of what might be done.  He was interested in the unintended consequences.  And so I think these prosecutorial skills are very basic to the way he approaches things, and if you look at his record in the Senate, you know, here he came from Massachusetts, he's got Ted Kennedy who is the lion, the legislative lion, no one more productive in the United States Senate at turning out legislation than Ted Kennedy.

So how is John Kerry going to make his mark?  And he made his mark in investigations, and, again, it's that prosecutorial approach.  I tell you, I think you're going to find, if he becomes President of the United States, that anybody that comes before him on a policy question better have done their homework, better be prepared or he'll eat them alive.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Kent, when you first got there, he had been there for two years.  How did you see him?  Certainly, from the outside, at that point, he seemed even then to be extraordinarily ambitious within the body.  Did you see him as standing out in that regard?

Did you develop a kind of bond with him?  Or was it one where you were on parallel tracks?

SENATOR CONRAD:  Well, you know, former majority leader George Mitchell, when he was being considered to be the commissioner of baseball, said it would be much easier for him to deal with thirty baseball owners and their big egos than a 100 senators.  That'd be a big improvement.  So I didn't see John as especially ambitious, more so than other colleagues.

What I did see in John is that, you know, they have in psychology this divide between those who are inner directed and those who are other directed.  I found John to be very much inner directed.  You know, this whole thing, this image of the outsider, I find with John he did not need a lotta people patting him on the back and telling him he was the greatest guy.  He seemed to march to his own drummer.  He seemed to have very much, be very much inner directed and maybe that flows from his growing up and the years when he was off at prep school and away from his parents.

This is somebody that's got a lot of, what I would consider inner strength, and that's what I noticed most about him.

MR. MANN:  Ed, Jim, and John Kerry all got involved very much in the nuclear freeze movement.  I think it became part of the politics of the '84 election campaign.  I wonder if Ed and Jim would just give us a little feel for that and whether there are any insights about John Kerry, the leader, from that experience?

MR. MARKEY:  Well, I introduced the nuclear freeze into the Congress in 1982 and it really began here in Massachusetts and in Vermont, out in the Berkshires here in Massachusetts and then up in Vermont.  And by August of 1982, a million people had been in Central Park, cheering for the cause of ending the nuclear arms race, and I had just barely lost on the vote on the House floor, 202 to 200, in the first week of August.

So heading into the election in 1982, except for the economy, this was the biggest issue in the country.  John Kerry ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982.  So this was his comeback after ten years of having been in the political wilderness, having lost for Congress in 1972, now he's running again, it's ten years later, and I would say about half of his campaign for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 was on what he would do to advance nuclear disarmament and the nuclear freeze, which I have to admit, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts has a tangential relationship with the negotiations.

MR.      :  Well, he doesn't have much else to do--

[Simultaneous conversation.]

MR. MARKEY:  But nonetheless, he understood, you know, that this was an issue that the voters of Massachusetts especially cared a lot about, and then as well in 1983 and '84, it continued on.  But very quickly he was able to move to and identify this as a very important issue.

MR. MANN:  Jim?

MR. SHANNON:  I think Ed's point is very instructive about the type of presidency that John Kerry would give us, because one thing about John Kerry, and this is a very good example--it's humorous that a guy running for lieutenant governor would be talking about nuclear freeze in some respects, but what I think John Kerry has always done in politics was to try to identify the big issues and to speak to the big issues.

And I don't think, you know, he's the sort of guy who's going to ever give, you know, a Clintonian laundry list of things he's going to do, type of a speech, but he's going to be looking at what are the big matters of concern and sort of focus on them.  You know, a one, a two, a three, a three point agenda.

I think he'd use--and the other thing that I think his involvement with the nuclear freeze and Ed was really the father, considered to be the father of the nuclear freeze, and the rest of us were all trying to become uncles or something, because that was a popular, it certainly was a very popular and important issue.

But I think that John has always understood the importance of the role of the politician as political leader.  In other words, not just sort of following but using political office or political candidacy as a way of advancing a cause and leading people in a particular direction, and I think that we will see, dare I say, a Reaganesque, from a Democratic perspective, approach to the presidency if John Kerry is elected.

I think he'll be very careful to try to focus on a few big issues, as he did with the nuclear freeze, as he did with acid rain in the early days, as he did with his investigative work in the Senate, as he did with the POW issue.  You know, there aren't that many issues where people can very quickly identify him with but the ones with which you can identify him were big central issues of their times, and I think that's the kind of presidency we'd see.

MR. MANN:  Can we learn anything from his brief stint as lieutenant governor?  I mean, it's not a powerful post.  He served under Michael Dukakis.  He was made chief of state-federal relations.  He worked on environmental matters.

How did he get along with Dukakis?  Did he make much of that position?  All of you have some insight into that.  I'd love to hear what you can add here.

MR. SHANNON:  Could I just make a quick--

MR. MANN:  Please.

MR. SHANNON:  I'll make a quick comment on that.  Again I think that, you know, it was a brief stint as lieutenant governor.  Being lieutenant governor is a very difficult role, particularly for anybody who has any ego, because, you know, you're a second banana, you're part of a team, you're not the leader of the team, and for somebody who had the reputation that John Kerry had had in this state, to assume that role, one would imagine would have been particularly difficult and it was not.

He was viewed as very much a loyal part of the Dukakis administration and part of that team.  I think he was very popular among the people with whom he had to work there and I think it was--you can get some real insight into him as a person, a politician, by looking at that short period of time, saying what did those people think of him?

They thought highly of him and Dukakis thought highly of him, and there wasn't that sort of inbred friction that one would have anticipated in that situation.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Let me just say, first of all, we have a half hour to go, we have to end at 11:15, and we want to leave about 15 minutes for questions.  So I'm going to ask one more question in this vein and then we will turn a bit more to Kerry in the Senate for just a few minutes and then look ahead to the shape of a Kerry administration, should there be one, especially in that larger political context.

The last question I want to ask to anybody on the panel is, you go back to the era, go back to the '70s when he came back from Vietnam and this race in 1984 where, really, it was a race in a Democratic primary where you guys were aiming at the margins of the margins, in some ways, of the electorate, but you could look at Kerry at that point and say that he was very much off on the left end of the political spectrum.

He was talking about ceding our ability to use military force to the United Nations as well as a whole series of other issues.  Looking at him today, was that, in some ways, tactics used to deal with the Democratic electorate in Massachusetts?

Was it the heartfelt thoughts of a young man who was shaped by the politics of his time? and all of us coming through that time know that it was a very different era.  Has he changed?  Has he grown?  Has he moved in his ideological viewpoint?

Is he more of a pragmatist, a kind of centrist now?  How would you look at his evolution in those terms?

MR. SHANNON [?]:  Well, I'd just say that I think that at that moment in history, to win the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Massachusetts, probably pushed us all pretty far to the left, and definitely pushed us all pretty far to the left in trying to make the appeal for the same constituencies.

I mean, one of the things about that race that was difficult but typical of Massachusetts politics is there were really no substantive differences between John Kerry and me, for instance, on the issues, and we were both trying to appeal to the same activist groups, and so in that context you'd probably say some things that cast you in a particular light.

I think that if you look at the broad sweep of John Kerry's career and sort of ask yourself what does it tell you about how he would govern as President, I think he is--and I think it also plays into another aspect of Kerry that has been commented on, I think Michael in your book--that there hasn't always been a great deal of passion on the part of liberal activities in Massachusetts for Kerry as a politician, and that is because I think he is more of a centrist than most of the activists in Massachusetts politics, and I would expect, on the basis, you know, if you look, he got to the Senate in 1985 and one of the first things he did was endorse the Gramm-Rudman proposal.

I think there have been other cases along the way, which we could cite.

I think that I would expect to see John Kerry be what he--base always has been, which is a person who believes that you have to get a consensus in politics.  I don't expect that he would be on the bleeding edge of issues.  I think on the social issues he'd be very progressive but I think basically he's a person who feels that the President needs to govern from the center and that's the kind of President he'd be.

MR.    :  Can I just say that when Reagan took over, there was a real sense that in the United States Senate, that there was too much accommodation to Reagan, and so the grassroots sentiment, not unlike what Dean identified and helped to catalyze, was very, very concerned that Reagan and his agenda was outta control.  And so this kind of rhetoric at the time was really meant to kind a slow it down.

But remember, almost immediately after becoming a senator, he's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  So at this point you can just walk across to the other side and try to find a couple of Republicans to, you know, go down and meet with the President and just let him know that if you're going to try to go in that direction you're not going to be able to do it.

So the difference between being on the outside and trying to organize a message that you hope politicians are going to respond to is different than being on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and being able to just take them out to lunch, and perhaps convince John McCain or Mark Hatfield, or someone else, that on this issue we just have to let the President know that he's not going to have any success on the Foreign Relations Committee if he's going to go in such a radical foreign policy direction.

SENATOR CONRAD:  Just a couple of things I wanted to--before we lost them.  One was the question on what can you learn about him in his role as lieutenant governor.  Obviously I'm not from Massachusetts but, you know, I've read a good deal about John.  I think there is a very big hint there about the way he operates.  That is, he was given the acid rain portfolio in that administration, and he really dug in, he really learned his brief, and he became somebody that worked that issue very hard and really brought it to the forefront.

So I think what Jim was saying is exactly right on, that he is probably going to focus on a handful of the most important issues and know them in great depth, and really try to move an agenda in those areas.

The other thing I wanted to mention with respect to where he falls on the political spectrum, I can say this after serving him for 18 years, and I'm a member of the mainstream coalition, I've been, I think I'm well-known as a deficit hawk.  John Kerry is a deficit hawk.  I think a lot of people are going to be somewhat surprised, how serious he is about getting us back to fiscal balance.  Very much a centrist political approach.

MR. MANN:  Jack.

MR. FARRELL:  Yeah. I mean, it's his home town and he's about to be nominated for President tonight, and you guys are all good Democrats, but somebody at least has to raise the possibility that he is a straddler, he is a flip-flopper and that he doesn't have these great leadership qualities, and I guess it's going to come, fall to me.

I want to give an example, to skip way ahead to the 1996 campaign, and John Kerry needed an issue to run on against Bill Weld.  And Ted Kennedy's staff packaged a child health care issue, gave it to Kerry to use in the campaign against Weld.

First of all, Kerry's staff--and here's a question about staff work--bungled the introduction of the bill.  Then Kerry ran on it, beat Weld up about it, and promised everybody that the Kennedy-Hatch--Orrin Hatch was the Republican sponsor--bill would be a top priority.

On election night, he stood there in front of the cameras and said, and when I go to Washington, the Kerry-Hatch bill will be my top priority, and then when he got to Washington--and correct me if I'm wrong, Ed--he did nothing.  He dropped it.  It was too much hard work.

This is a guy who likes the limelight, he's very opportunistic, and a lot of times--he did it with affirmative action, he's done it with education reform.  If he dips his toe in the water and finds out that the Massachusetts political climate is unhealthy, he will drift back, and that's why he does get this reputation for straddling and flip-flopping.

MR.      :  Can I just deal with the flip-flopping issue, because the most--the one he's accused of, and you see in the ads, is this notion that he was for the $87 billion for Iraq before he voted against it, and they've got him saying I voted for it before I voted against it.  Of course what they've taken out is the context.

He voted for it when it was paid for.  He voted against it when the President refused to pay for it and just wanted to put it on the deficit.

So that's not a flip-flop.  That's a principled position.  There's nobody in politics that doesn't change positions over time as circumstances change and as facts change.

I must say, in the 18 years I've served with John, I would say he is a picture of consistency.  You know, do you, if you advance a legislative package and you see that that doesn't have prospects for success, do you back off and redirect your efforts somewhere else?  Absolutely.  That's just good use of one's time.

MR.      :  Let me just respond quickly.  Kent Conrad has been a fighter for fiscal responsibility consistently, whether he got beaten up and had to go home with bruises or not, and my point is is that one thing we should take away as to how Kerry can govern is how he will respond if, in the first week of his administration, he begins to get beaten up on gays in the military.  You know, will he wisely drift back and drop it or will he find another way to get this into law somewhere along the lines in the four years, and I think that's still an open question.

SENATOR CONRAD:  I'd say this to you on the fiscal front, where I've been most involved with John, he has been, whether it was popular or unpopular, he has been one of the handful that has really been disciplined to get our fiscal house in order.  Now I can say, I think he's just been very consistent on that kind of an issue.

MR. MANN:  Michael?  Excuse me.  Ed, you want to jump in right there, and then Michael.

MR.      :  Oh, no, no, no.  Please.

MR. KRANISH:  Just very briefly, I just want to make the point that this is the first time, seems obvious but it's worth underlining, that John Kerry has run outside of Massachusetts.  He has, as Jim mentioned, he's had to run to this left time and time again.  He never was totally embraced by the liberal wing.  Maybe he can use that now to his advantage.

Clearly, the Bush campaign, as Bush's father did to Michael Dukakis, will try to wrap him up in the "l" word.  Kerry's asked, Do you want to describe yourself as a liberal?  He doesn't like to be described as a, quote, liberal.  He prefers the word progressive.

And one other point about--this is not necessarily a change in position but an emphasis, and that is in 1970 and '72, John Kerry ran twice for the U.S. House and lost both times, when he ran, emphasizing his antiwar credentials.  When he ran for lieutenant governor and then for the Senate, he did not emphasize that at all, hardly.

He emphasized more his war record and I think that educates people today as to why is he not running, you know, as a strong antiwar candidate.

He's basically saying we can't cut and run.  He voted for the 2002 Iraq war resolution.  Well, his life experience teaches him that running as the antiwar candidate, when you can be blasted as unpatriotic, as he was in 1972 by the Lowell Sun and others, it's not necessarily the path to victory.  In fact twice it was the path to defeat.

So he's had to speak more with nuance this time around about the most important issue of the day which is the war.  He disagrees basically with almost all of the delegates in the hall.  This hasn't been, you know, written about that much but the Globe did a poll of the delegates and we found that 95 percent of the delegates were opposed to the war and John Kerry has been asked, Do you regret your war vote? and he has said no, I don't regret it.  He's complained about how Bush has exercised the war but he has said that he made the right vote, given the information he had at the time, and doesn't think it was a mistake.

So he's actually at odds with most of those people in the hall and I think it has very much to do with what happened to him in 1970 and 1972.

MR. MANN:  Let's turn to the administration itself and what a Kerry administration would look like.  We have just a few minutes.  Oh, I'm sorry--

MR. MARKEY:  Just 30 seconds.  I would say this, because of the audience that we have.  No U.N. inspectors have been in Iraq for four years and the vote on the House and Senate floor was characterized by the Bush administration as one which would give him the strength to go to the U.N., to have the U.N. pass a resolution after four years, to finally put the inspectors in, and if Saddam could be disarmed, if it could be proved that he did not have weapons of mass destruction, then war would be a last resort.

And so it is now clear that going to the U.N. was the right decision, putting the inspectors in was the right decision, but not listening then to what the inspectors gave back as the information was the problem, because at that point on March 18th in 2003, the prevarication coefficient inside of the Bush administration was at the highest of any administration in history because you can't lie about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, if  you had substantial evidence at this point that they don't exist.

So, in other words, going to the U.N. was the right vote, getting the inspectors in after the U.N. had kind of resisted it for four years was the right thing to do, but then at that point, when the information was gathered, the information would be would John Kerry then have begun a war at that point, based upon the information six months later that had been gathered after the vote had been cast in the U.N. and the world community had been involved?  And that's the point at which the Democrats believe he would not have started the war.  That he would have asked for continued U.N. engagement, that he would have extended the period of time for inspectors, and he would have tried to have avoided the war at all costs, that the evidence wasn't there, that it was not justified.

SENATOR CONRAD:  Can I just add to this point because I think it is so important.  Look, I'm one of the people that voted against authorizing this war because I thought it was a mistake for the national security interest of the United States.

But I had discussions with John throughout this period and I believe John and many others believed voting to authorize was a way of giving the President leverage to reduce the chances of going to war.  Now that did not turn out.  It didn't turn out, not because of some failure of John Kerry's.  I think it didn't turn out because of a failure of the Bush administration and people within the Bush administration who'd made a determination before September 11th ever occurred, to go to war with Iraq.

So I don't think his vote on the war is correctly portrayed in many circles.because

MR. ORNSTEIN:  There are a few critical questions that I'd like to deal with in the few minutes remaining before we have some questions.

A theme of this convention, a theme clearly of the Kerry campaign is I will be a uniter, not a divider, unlike George Bush in his first four years, and he has suggested repeatedly, and his campaign has, that he will reach out to Republicans he will bring Republicans into his administration, he will have bipartisanship in governing, and I think we should explore that a little bit, including, first of all, what kind of a bipartisan he has been in the Senate.

We know that perhaps his closest friends are John McCain and Chuck Hagle, Republicans, but also because of that deep bond that he feels, and clearly the animation that he feels when he's with other Vietnam veterans.

We know that he worked with Jesse Helms at an early stage of his Senate career on the drug investigation with the contras--

MR.      :  But don't let that out on the convention floor!

MR. ORNSTEIN:  But we also know that he is not a particularly warm and fuzzy guy in terms of those bonds, that this is an extremely difficult time to work across party lines in any event.

So let me ask any of you what your judgment is about whether you actually can be a uniter, not a divider, in this environment and how genuine it is with John Kerry, and also, if we look to the kinds of people who would be in a Kerry administration, would we see a Secretary of State, Dick Lugar, or John Warner, as he has sometimes suggested?

Would we see a Chuck Hagle or a John McCain?  How easy will it be to find a different dynamic in governing?

MR.      :  Can I just--I think Michael Kranish made a very interesting point about the Globe poll of the delegates at the convention.

I mean, here you have a situation where the overwhelming majority of delegates to the convention are at significant odds with the nominee on the biggest issue, and they're all incredibly enthusiastic about electing him President of the United States.  You know, there aren't any demonstrations on that floor saying we demand a peace plank or any of, you know, that stuff.

There is a consensus in the Democratic Party that we have to defeat George Bush, which gives Kerry an enormous opening if he's elected as President, to reach out and be a true bipartisan President, governing from the center.

I was trying to think of, you know, what the analogy would be, and, you know, initially, you sort of say, well, Bill Clinton sort of tried to govern from the center, but Clinton is not a good analogy because Clinton always had just a bedrock of support among a group of activists in the Democratic Party that wasn't going to go away.  I don't think John Kerry quite has that but what Kerry has, that Clinton never had, is Clinton had a certain accident proneness to his administration.

You know, he was the guy on the tightrope with one foot, you know, ready to fall off at any given moment, with the potential for some political issue to sort of dislodge him, a tension factor there that I don't think will exist with the Kerry presidency, if he's elected President.

I think he'll have some people in the Democratic Party who wish he'd go a little further, a little faster, but I think he'll be in a position where he can work from the center, he can reach out to those moderate elements and independent elements, if he wants to, to maintain a consensus.

It's more, I think it's more like Tony Blair than it is Clinton, is the opportunity he faces, and I think John Kerry understands that.  So I would expect to see a very different type of Democratic presidency if Kerry is elected President.

MR. MANN:  Ed, is there any chance of working with a Democratic President, working with Republicans in the House, especially if the Republicans were to retain their, even a narrower majority?  Is it possible?

MR. MARKEY:  Again, the President has the bully pulpit.  I'll give you a good example.  There's a huge energy bill that was pretty much the secret energy task force of Dick Cheney that was put together in the White House, brought up to the Hill, passed on a partisan basis.  Every oil, gas, coal, nuclear, solar utility issue for the next generation, all in one bill, 1100 pages long, and Henry Waxman and John Dingell and I, we were supposed to be the negotiators for the Democrats, but we were not invited to any meetings.

We had no idea, you know, who we would talk to.  The 1100 pages wasn't given to us until Saturday afternoon at 1:00 and the whole bill was then marked up in the conference committee on Monday, from 9:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night.  That's every issue dealing with energy sources in America.

So you don't have to go far to beat that standard of bipartisanship, okay?  It's a very low level--and there's no issue really more important than energy.  I know we've got 140,000 young men and women over there, global warming, asthma, public health issues, balance-of-payment issues.  I mean, it just distorts your foreign policy.  It's a central issue.  And they don't talk to any of us.

So John Kerry's challenge--and he will accept it, I agree with Jimmy on this--is that in the House, for example, not withstanding Tom DeLay's close partnership with Dick Cheney as kind a oil state people, is that there's a solid 30 or 40 Republicans, if the issue is framed correctly, that really could be put on the defensive by a President who is going to the America public, especially with a Senate that has more bipartisan instincts.

And so I would say that that would be how he would govern.  That he would try to identify the Republican members with whom he could work, bring them in from the very beginning, and then try to create the atmospherics of bipartisanship right from the beginning on the big issues and energy and environment will be very near and dear to his heart, and that's a good example of an area which will be totally transformed by a Kerry presidency from the way in which Bush and Cheney have governed.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Can it work in the Senate?

SENATOR CONRAD:  You know, it's very difficult.  Very difficult.  This atmosphere has really been poisoned.  This President said he was going to be a uniter, not a divider.  I've never seen us more divided and I've never seen a time when we more needed to be united, and yet this President, this administration has been by far the most partisan I've served with in the 18 years I've been there.

John Kerry has been one who has been able to reach across party lines.  Certainly, normalization of relations with Vietnam.  He and John McCain really did that, and it was under President Clinton's watch, but the guys that made that happen were John Kerry and John McCain and they did form a very close bond on that and other issues.

You know, these members who have fought and have seen battle up close, they do have a special bond.  It's very evident to the rest of us that they do.

I think John would have the ability and the instinct to reach across party lines.  I think you saw that in the vice presidential consideration.  I mean, he really did--I know, from those who were involved in the search, he was very serious about considering John McCain and trying to figure out how you bridge this extremely bitter partisan divide that exists today.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Well, let me ask one last question here before we turn for a few minutes to questions.

The first 100 days is a very good marker of a presidency, how you approach it, what you do.

There are different models.  George W. Bush in his first 100 days, a tough time with that election and losing seats in both houses of Congress, focused on two priorities, his tax cuts and the education, No Child Left Behind bill, pushed relentlessly on both at the same time and ultimately succeeded on both.

When Bill Clinton became President, he had a huge platform putting people first, and put them all out there, and had great difficulty getting a focal point.  What we know of Kerry is that he tends to focus on issues and probably will have one or two priorities.

If you agree that that is the case, and if you disagree, please say so.  What do you think they'll be?  He's got a very ambitious plan to deal with the uninsured.  But to be fiscally responsible, the predicate to that is that he bring in the revenue that comes from repealing the tax cuts for the wealthy.

He's got a lot of other priorities out there including full funding of No Child Left Behind, many things that we heard talked about by John Edwards last night.

What will he do in his first 100 days to make it happen and if he can't get the Republicans to go along with repeal of the tax cuts for the top 2 percent, where is he?

MR.      :  That's exactly right.  He's put himself in a little bit of a box or maybe a huge box because everything flows from repealing the tax cut on those earning over $200,000.  If he can't get that repealed, and it would be very difficult to do unless Democrats, you know, get control of the House and the Senate, he can't do a lot of what he wants to do.  He can't provide the health insurance for 27 million uninsured as he says he wants to do.

He can't fully fund the No Child Left Behind education bill.  So I don't know what he does if he can't get that tax cut repealed.  I mean, he just basically can go around the country.

I think he'll have difficulty getting that unless there's an overwhelming victory by the Democrats.

What I think he'll do instead, if he can't get that is--and he'll have to do it in either case--is focus a lot on international affairs.  He's not going to have perhaps quick and easy success, if he is elected President, on the tax issue, so he'll try to go around and spread the internationalist philosophy and say I've got to meet with these foreign leaders, spend a lot of time focusing on that, and hope that builds up support on the domestic side, if he's successful internationally.

Usually it's the opposite.  Usually you focus right away on the economy and so forth, but if he runs into difficulty there, as I think he will, he'll try to build up support for him abroad.

MR.      :  You know, let me just say I believe he will focus, I think that's his whole pattern, I think that's the way he operates.  I think the focus will be on two things--the terrorist threat to the United States and trying to win allies in this global battle.  And I think you're exact right on.  I think that will be the primary focus, and the other dimension will be the economy.

And part of that will be reestablishing some kind of fiscal plan that is not taking us right off the cliff into deficits as far as the eye can see, of a size so large that it's utterly unsustainable for the country.

I think those are the two areas where he's going to have to focus and that he will.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Ed, if Hastert and DeLay are still running the House, and President Kerry has a proposal that includes repealing the tax cuts for those in the upper income categories, and the leadership simply refuses to move it forward, do you think Kerry, by working with a bully pulpit, could persuade enough Republicans to basically defeat the rule to get a vote on what Kerry wants?

MR. MARKEY:  That is the question.  You know, I mean that is the question.  These Republicans, if John Kerry wins, will be urged to return--not to return but to further increase the level of partisanship that they have demonstrated.

There's not a lot of room for addition to it but that will be Tom DeLay's attitude--just stop this man, you know, and make sure he doesn't have any momentum.  So that'll be the intention. Although I do agree with Kent, that he has a real chance in homeland security and in the international arena, to really build up a pretty substantial reservoir of public support.

The country really is uneasy with this Bush foreign policy team, and with kind of the gamesmanship that goes on with orange, yellow, red, and all of that.  So if he could come in and really be seen as a very strong leader, and perhaps it doesn't start in the House and it probably won't start in the House, but over in the Senate, if he does a good job over there, that he can isolate Tom DeLay and Hastert on an issue, but that really polls out unbelievably high--this is a 70, 80 percent issue, the repeal of the upper 2 percentile--then they are spending vast amounts of their political capital on something that's unbelievably unpopular as the President is making the case for funding with $9 billion, a very small amount of that tax cut, the full funding of No Child Left Behind, to make a down payment on the prescription drug program in a way that will work in a much better way.

So I could see a dynamic working, maybe not going straight at the House immediately, but having another strategy that, within six weeks or eight weeks, has the Senate and its foreign policy defense strategy now isolating Hastert and DeLay as really being obstacles to the real change our country needs.

So you could do it.  Now whether or not, in the end, even that is successful, I don't know because there's an awful lot of power in the office of the speaker and the majority leader, and the Republican Party.  It's absolutely astounding, Stepford Wives like control over these members.  It's amazing.

MR.      :  If I could, I don't think he will get trapped, as Clinton did, into an impossible agenda, priority agenda, when he becomes President, if he becomes President.

But I do agree with what Kent said, what Michael said, and what Ed have said.  There are some issues that he can focus on in that first 100 days where there's an opportunity for some bipartisan efforts and deficit reduction I think is one where there's a great deal of discomfort on the Republican side with deficits.  There is on the Democratic side as well.

I don't think it'll be the spending part of the Democratic domestic agenda.  I think it'll be the deficit reduction part of the agenda.  Homeland security, as Ed said, and the question of emergency response and implementation of the 9/11 commission.

You know, some of that will be done this fall but that's going to be a bipartisan effort that will be hanging over in January and I think it'll be part of John Kerry's agenda.

And then the third thing, I don't think he needs the Congress for and I agree with what Michael said.  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised, and I don't think it's happened, probably since Eisenhower went to Korea or something, but I wouldn't be the last bit surprised if President Kerry took an early trip overseas, maybe in the first three months of this presidency, to demonstrate to the world that there is going to be a new attitude of the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.

He doesn't need the approval of Congress to do it.  I think there's a general feeling that it needs to be done.  It won't cost anything and I would expect that he would consider doing something like that.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  We had a lot of ground to cover and we had a somewhat crimped period of time.

We have just a few more minutes, if there are one or two questions from the floor, I would like to involve the audience, and just stand up and go to the mike, if you would.

We'll take these--well, actually we'll take three questions together and then we'll have the panel respond to them.  So, please.  Tell us who you are.

AMBASSADOR SSEMPALA:  Edith Ssempala.  I'm ambassador of Uganda to United States.  I just wanted to ask a question concerning international trade, especially WTO.  If the senator could just give us an idea as to what has been the record and what we should be expecting.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Why don't we take the questions all at once and then we'll get responses to them.  So trade and WTO and Kerry.  Tell us who you are.

MR. GATES:  Mike Gates, MP, from UK.  what do you think the attitude of President Kerry will be to commitment of additional forces in Iraq, if allies are still reluctant to increase or come in?

MR. HOLM:  Richard Holm, also from the UK. Listening to John Edwards last night and listening to the panel this morning, we've got very substantial spending commitments implicit in the campaign already on the part of the Democrats and I wonder where the panel would place John Kerry on the spectrum from tax-and-spend liberal to Clinton/Gore type New Democrat.  Where would they place him on that spectrum.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Three great questions.

Why don't we start, Kent, with the trade issue, quickly.

SENATOR CONRAD:  On the trade issue, I think John Kerry's record is well-known.  He's been a supporter of WTO but he has also recognized that the devil is in the details.  We just can't put free trade on an agreement and make it so.

What defines whether an agreement truly represents a fair settlement on trade issues is in the details and I think you will find, as I have described before, John Kerry will know the details, perhaps better than any President other than Bill Clinton because that's the way he operates.

On the question of, if I could just take the third question as well, John Kerry is much closer to, I believe, the Bill Clinton New Democrat approach on fiscal matters that the other direction of the party.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Just one follow-up.  In terms of strategy on trade, George Bush has pursued a strategy of working for a whole series of bilateral free trade agreements.  Do you think John Kerry would continue along that line, he might have slight differences in the details, or would he move in a different general direction?

SENATOR CONRAD:  I think he would move in a considerably different direction.  I think instead of a whole series of bilateral deals, I think he would be much more interested in a comprehensive approach, and I think most in the trade area would tell you that needs to be the next international trade agenda, comprehensive approach to these problems rather than these bilateral deals which may not really accomplish very much.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  I think the troop level question or if anybody else wants to respond--the troop level is really as much about relations with allies.  Right?  Ed and then Jack.

MR. MARKEY:  Obviously when an administration says we're just pulling out of the Kyoto treaty, we don't care about a comprehensive test ban treaty, and we're pulling out unilaterally from the anti ballistic missile treaty, et cetera, right up to the point where they're telling all the inspectors from the world who are in Iraq, "Get out," you know, "I know you're telling us that it's working but just get out, we're going to start the war next week," well, that's not the best formula for then asking countries in the world to give a hand in Iraq, to create some stability.

So I think what John Kerry will do, right from the outset of his administration, is to reengage the rest of the world on all of those other issues that the Bush administration has ignored and taken a unilateralist approach.

and I think after establishing the premise that he is going to be a partner with the rest of the world on every issue, and only when it's impossible, to go it alone, rather than the opposite, which as the Bush administration, to work with the world on absolutely nothing except where they're absolutely forced to, then he'll be in a much stronger position to ask the world to help give troop support, to give financial support to the Iraqis because it'll be a partnership, and that'll be his intention and I think he won't want to walk away until there is stability in the country but he also won't want the United States to have to shoulder that burden indefinitely because of a continuation of this Bush policy of unilateralism.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  We are talking in the United States right now about Iraq and not about China, and not about AIDS in Africa, and not about Japan, but I promise you that John Kerry is speaking every night about AIDS in Africa, and Japan and China, and a year from now I will not be surprised if like all of you were like watching the phone ring on your desks and saying, "Oh, no, it's the United States again, what do they want now?"  This is a guy, you're not going to believe the difference in engagement.  His entire life, from when he was watching Dean Acheson and his father was in the State Department, as a kid, his entire life is a feeling that the world is interconnected, that people of good will can make the right things happen, and you're going to be exhausted!

MR.      :  Steel yourself!

MR.      :  You have to remember the line from the John F. Kennedy inaugural address and what we all remember is ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.

I think the next line is something like nations of the world, don't ask what America can do for you but what we can do for humankind together, and I think that melds John Kerry's thinking to this day.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Well, this has been a superb experience.  I want to thank John Fortier of AEI and a stable of interns we've had who've worked on this to make it all happen.  Three super star politicians and two super star reporters for making all of this possible, and thank you all as well, and Pat.

MR.      :  Thank you very much, Norm.  Thank you, Norm.  Thank you, Tom.  Senator.  Congressman Markey, Congressman Shannon.  Michael, it's great to see you.  Thank you very much.

This has been a fabulous panel and I'd like also to institutionally thank both AEI and the Brookings Institution for really marvelous cooperation over a large number of years and we look forward to this continuing.

I would like you to take your seats for just one moment as we allow the panelists to leave and I'll cover a couple of housekeeping details.  Thank you.
[END OF RECORDED SEGMENT.]