PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

BRUCE BARTLETT -- "The Ghost Senator":

Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler, author of The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security .. starts by noting that there were certain senators that he always knew would be major players on defense issues. Whether he agreed with them or thought they were dreadfully wrong, the views of certain senators always commanded respect. They came to the Senate floor well prepared for serious debate, commanded facts and analyses supporting their positions, and always contributed something meaningful to every issue they engaged in. "But then," Wheeler writes, "there was also another type of senator I would run across in the elevator or see in the chamber -- the ones I could never associate with any deed or even articulated thought that had any lasting effect. The thought would dash through my head, 'Oh, yeah, he's a senator too; forgot that he was even still around here.' John Kerry was such a senator."

Kerry should have been a major player on foreign policy and defense issues, Wheeler thinks. He is a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .. But instead of being a player, Wheeler calls him a "ghost senator." Says Wheeler, Kerry "had all the physical trappings of a senator .. But, Kerry never seemed to make a difference. It was almost as if he was both a member of the Senate and yet not a member, at least not one that mattered. He was a 'ghost senator'; he had all the form, but none of the substance."

Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack