Senate Floor To Be a Stage For '08 Race

Only two sitting senators, Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy, have succeeded as presidential candidates. One who came up short, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), said the landscape now appears radically different from when he launched his 2004 campaign, shortly after the Iraq invasion.

The Democratic nominee's infamous line about war spending -- "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- typified the Senate curse. But Kerry said because voters today are far more skeptical about the war, they now understand the distinctions.

"We're five years into the war, and the strategy has failed. And it's failed deep into the consciousness of the American people," Kerry said. "There's not the kind of confusion there was in 2004."

It might appear that former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) would benefit from giving up his seat in 2004, given the historical odds -- 13 former senators have won the presidency since 1789. But the last entry on Edwards's official Iraq record was his 2002 vote for authorization. He is now a strong critic of the war and has apologized to primary voters at every turn, but he can play no direct role in changing U.S. policy.

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) is spending as little time as possible on Capitol Hill as he tries to revive his struggling campaign. A staunch Bush ally, McCain is on the wrong side of public opinion on Iraq, and every Senate vote on the war reinforces that. But as the highest-ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, McCain must spend part of July in Washington seated on the Senate floor, managing the defense bill.

"John McCain is a case study this year on the difficulty of running from the Senate," said former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), who decided against a presidential bid in 2004, having learned from former senator Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) that it is almost impossible to juggle both jobs.

"I did once before," shrugged McCain, referring to wearing two political hats. "It's fine."

Senate newcomer Obama has participated prominently in the Iraq debate as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. The withdrawal timetable that the president vetoed tracked closely with a proposal Obama outlined in the Senate in January. He also was an early proponent of establishing benchmarks for the Iraqi government, an idea that Republicans and the White House also embraced.

"Obama's been against the war from the beginning, and being in the Senate offers him an opportunity to fight to end it," said his spokesman Bill Burton.

Dodd and Biden have found the Senate to be a useful -- and free -- forum for drawing attention to their long-shot campaigns. Dodd ran ads in Iowa urging his 2008 rivals to vote with him to cut off war funding and renamed the bill "Feingold-Reid-Dodd" on his news releases, joining original sponsors Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Reid, the Senate leader.

Biden, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said his Senate perch "allows me to have instant credibility" on Iraq. "If I had been the best governor ever, it still isn't the same," he said.

"On an awful lot of issues, the case can be made that governors accomplish things, while members of Congress spend their time debating and voting," said Jim Jordan, a Democratic political consultant who is advising Dodd and who served as Kerry's campaign manager in 2003. "The war has changed all that."

The downsides for Senate presidential candidates still exist. The Democratic-led Congress, after all, is almost as unpopular as Bush.

"It's a rare situation, because you don't normally have an Iraq," Daschle said. "For Democrats, to a certain extent, it will be important that we show we can govern. The country's perception of these candidates will be affected, in part, by its perception of the Senate as a whole."