One of the talking points of the Bush campaign has been that John Kerry has “very few signature achievements” from his 19 years in the senate. Now I could be mean and say that the only “signature achievements” that Bush had from his time as Governor of Texas were taking credit for a patient’s bill of rights law that he vetoed, publicly dissing the family of lynching victim James Byrd, and the highest death penalty rate in our nation’s history….but that would be wrong.

Rather than engage in mudslinging, let me point out some of the highlights of John Kerry’s career :

While the numerical comparison of bills passed makes for an easy tit-for-tat, Congress experts agree that it’s a simplistic way of measuring relative senatorial success. “I don’t think, taken by itself, that it’s a fair way to compare,” says Yale political science professor David Mayhew. “It’s easy to get your name on something if you’re the chairman of a committee.” Besides, he says, “legislating is not the only thing that they do that makes them important.” Mayhew says there are three ways for a member of Congress to distinguish himself: as a legislator, as a leader of the public discourse — think Sunday talk regulars like Jesse Helms or Joseph Biden — or as an investigator.

Kerry has made his mark as the latter. As freshman senators in 1985, Kerry and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin sent themselves on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua to assess the dangers posed by the Sandinista government. Upon their return, Kerry began to receive tips suggesting that the Reagan administration was illegally funneling aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, the rebels struggling to overthrow the Sandinista government, and that the Contras were using supply chains established with U.S. assistance to carry on a bustling drug trade. Kerry took it upon himself to launch a probe. In the months ahead, he developed enough information to persuade more senior members of the senate Foreign Relations Committee to conduct a full-scale investigation.

In a follow-up investigation, Kerry developed information that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was trafficking in drugs and sending money out of the country to the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, or BCCI. Kerry launched another investigation and developed information leading to criminal indictments and the collapse of BCCI in 1991.

A year later, Kerry and Sen. John McCain led a senate select committee assigned to investigate whether American prisoners of war were still being held in Vietnam. After an exhaustive investigation, they reported finding no evidence that any American was still being held. Based on that finding, the two Vietnam veterans, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, worked together in an effort that would ultimately lead President Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam in 1995.

In the American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias expands on those points a bit more :

Which is not to say that Kerry’s been doing nothing all this time. Many of those thousands of votes were important. And Kerry’s made some tough — and correct — calls on controversial issues like the Graham-Rudman deficit reduction bill, the 1993 budget deal, and the 1996 welfare reform act, all of which were controversial within his party and often unpopular in his home state.

Kerry was one of a very small number of senators with the guts to vote against the appalling Defense of Marriage Act; did some solid work on investigative committees in the 1980s; expanded the writ of the previously piddling Fisheries Subcommittee he briefly chaired in 2001-02; and really was a key player in normalizing relations with Vietnam, something that doesn’t take up a lot of mind space here at home but has contributed immensely to improved living standards in Southeast Asia.
. . .
Kerry didn’t do much as a senator besides read bills other people wrote and decide how to vote on them. The president, meanwhile, doesn’t read the newspaper. Or his daily intelligence briefings. Or the reports of government commissions. Not even the executive summaries!

There’s even more about Kerry’s senate career at his Rapid Response Center.

In the end, the election shouldn’t be about what the candidate has accomplished in the past, but whether he’s got the brains, guts, and reasoning skills to make the right decisions in the future. Bush’s reluctance to keep informed about multiple sides of a debate, willingness to put his personal interests ahead of those of the American people, and history of making important decisions based on their political implications should, in a perfect world, be enough to disqualify him from the race entirely.