Kerry is a good, safe choice for the job. He has made an entire Senate career out of taking on foreign-policy issues that nobody else — except Gary Hart — ever wanted to touch. He led the way in normalizing diplomatic relations with Vietnam at a time in which H. Ross Perot was still running around the country talking about thousands of American POW's in camps in Laos, and while the country was filling the theaters watching Sly Stallone as John Rambo, doing as good a job of revising that sad episode in American history as can be expected from an actor who sat out the war as the chaperone at a girls' school in Switzerland. He took on the rat's nest at the Bank Of Commerce And Credit International, when BCCI was laundering money for whoever came through the door, and when BCCI also had bought enough politicians in Washington that Kerry and his investigators were pretty much out there alone. Here's a bit on that from a profile I did back in 2004.

In the Senate, throughout the 1980s, Kerry made his mark spelunking down the darkest caverns of what had become a reinvigorated secret government. He chased the illicit aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua and the byzantine operations of a bank called BCCI, a sort of international ATM for black ops. And he did so alone, as far outside in the clubby world of the Senate as he ever had been in Massachusetts. "This was a bad case of bubonic plague," says Jack Blum, Kerry's investigator through those years. One prominent Democratic senator tried to sabotage Kerry's investigations, and the Republicans, riding Ronald Reagan's popularity, went after him as harshly as the Nixon people ever did. In fact, it is a kind of unprecedented historical parlay that John Kerry's name appears both on Nixon's White House tapes and in the notebooks of Oliver North. For Kerry, the investigations were pure reform politics, but they also were leavened with a respect for what happens when people are tricked away from their investment in their government. "It's antithetical to everything we are," he explains. "A government with secrets is accountable; a secret government is not. And when that happens, the American people are cheated of what is rightly theirs."