COLUMN ONE : Kerrey: A New Kind of Odyssey : Democratic contender, a war hero, struggled mightily with the wounds of Vietnam. With seemingly all the ‘right stuff,’ he now struggles to connect with voters.

As the haze of anesthesia receded, Bob Kerrey could make out the anxious faces of his parents against the bleak walls of the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. He summoned Elinor Kerrey to his side, and muttered: “How much is left?”

Military doctors had struggled to undo the mess that a crude North Vietnamese grenade had made of his right leg, but a spreading bone infection left no option but to amputate mid-calf. The high school athlete and college heartthrob now was just another bit of war refuse in a hospital that he would come to regard as a government dumpster.

Standing over his bed, his mother seemed not to notice the rage and disillusionment that had replaced the Midwestern innocence in her 25-year-old son’s face. “She looked down at me and said: ‘There’s a lot left.’ And she wasn’t talking about body parts, she was talking about here,” Kerrey says, touching his heart.

Almost 23 years later, the Nebraska senator returns to that scene often in speeches as he travels from one depressed New Hampshire town to the next, trying to keep alive his sputtering bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He offers his mother’s words as a metaphor for America, one that speaks to the possibilities of national rejuvenation.

The moment also etched a fault line into Kerrey’s own life. Lt. (j.g.) Joseph Robert Kerrey came out of the war a certified hero, the holder of his government’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor. But as he wobbled onto the Philadelphia streets, the welcome he got was from strangers who called him a baby killer.

Nine months after his leg was amputated in 1969, Kerrey was released from the hospital to face a lifetime of disfigurement and pain. He returned home no longer trusting values and assumptions that had been his bedrock. Old buddies found him distant and quiet.

“There was a sense of searching at that time for Bob . . . a new depth in his eyes,” recalls Kerrey’s younger sister, Nebraska State Sen. Jessie Rasmussen.

Kerrey puts it differently. “Pain makes it difficult to see,” Kerrey says. “It can blind you and narrow you, whether it’s the pain of loneliness, or physical pain, or the pain of a loss.”

So he set out to heal the hurt, to answer for himself the question he had asked his mother. Along the way, he found parts of Bob Kerrey that he had never even known were there.

Kerrey moved to Berkeley, where other searchers of his generation showed him new ways of looking at things. Abandoning plans to become a druggist, he tried a series of jobs before starting a successful restaurant chain back in Nebraska. He married, started a family and after four years divorced. Defying his handicap, he ran a marathon.

A political unknown who decided that Nebraska state government could benefit from his business experience, Kerrey challenged an incumbent governor in 1982 and won. Then he stunned his supporters by leaving office after his first term to teach a Vietnam War course in Santa Barbara. Two years later, he was back in politics, waging a successful Senate campaign in 1988.

Along that crooked path, Kerrey, now 48, discovered inner direction, the core of his character. His admirers will tell you that Kerrey has a depth and honesty that make him unique among a crop of politicians too often guided by consultants, think tanks and opinion polls.

“He’s looked everywhere, for every kind of answer. I think he finds them in his own experience,” says Kandra Hahn, who headed Kerrey’s energy office when he was governor of Nebraska. “He’s willing to trust his own instincts, and that’s all he trusts.”

If there is a recipe for charisma, Kerrey would seem to have all the ingredients: good looks, a solid Midwestern upbringing, a hero’s war record, a self-made business success story and popularity that verges on adoration in his heavily Republican home state. His on-again, off-again romance with actress Debra Winger laces the brew with Hollywood glamour.

Thrilled Many in Party

So Kerrey’s late entry into the presidential race last September thrilled many in party circles, who thought they had found the first truly electrifying liberal since Bobby Kennedy. But thus far, it hasn’t worked out that way; instead, the Kerrey campaign finds itself running out of time and money as it battles for what looks to be a third or even a fourth place finish in the five-man Democratic race in New Hampshire Feb. 18.

His critics contend that this national bid has shown Kerrey’s limits. They say all he has to offer is his own biography. He can be compelling and inspiring when he deals with subjects relating to his own experiences--such as health care, his campaign’s centerpiece--but distant and vague in less familiar territory. The typical Kerrey stump speech, one political consultant says, amounts to “stringing 100 fortune cookies together.”

Aides say it is merely taking a while for their candidate to “connect,” which is a term that Kerrey has come to despise. For his part, he blames inflated expectations, a shortened campaign season and low name recognition. But what bothers Kerrey the most, he says, is that no one seems to be paying attention to the questions that he wants to raise.

“I’m troubled by the lack of information upon which decisions are made,” Kerrey said in a recent interview. “Flip on the nightly news and make a decision; flip on the nightly news and see who the smart guys say is the front-runner and go with the front-runner. . . . The selection of a candidate should be secondary. The primary decision is what should our educational system be? What should our health care system be? What should our environmental regulation be? How do we create more jobs?”

That may not be the simplest way to make a decision, he added, but “it’s usually true that the easy way is the worst.”

Plenty of Problems

As Bob Kerrey graduated from Northeast High School, the yearbook noted: “If there was one thing the world had plenty of in the school year 1960-61, it was problems.”

There was unrest in the Congo, revolution in Laos, an American U-2 spy plane downed in the Soviet Union. But none of that made a mark on the quiet lives of people in Bethany, a comfortable, working-class community on the edge of Lincoln, Neb.

When Kerrey and other students discussed those world events in teacher Henry Willemsen’s “Modern Problems” class, no one ever mentioned another festering trouble spot.

“No, we didn’t hear anything about Vietnam until much later,” says Willemsen, who still teaches at Northeast High. “We’re not the first to grab onto anything, whether it’s a hula hoop or whether it’s a political problem.”

Ricky Nelson might have fit right in at Northeast High; James Dean wouldn’t have. Boys wore their hair in crew cuts. Girls put theirs in headache bands or french twists, and if they were thinking of careers, they joined clubs with names like Steno-ettes.

Midwestern Protestants Jim and Elinor Kerrey had moved to Bethany in the early 1940s to start a construction business and a brood that eventually grew to seven children. People joked that every year seemed to find the Kerreys with a new house and a new baby.

The third of the seven, Bob was a good but not a stellar student. He held no major student offices in high school, as his brother, John, had. Nor was he particularly popular. “Bob was not the charismatic, warm, everybody-loved-him kind of kid,” says Asst. Principal Barry Moore, who taught Kerrey two years of mathematics and coached him in football.

But in athletics, Kerry impressed everyone--not so much by his talent, but by his determination. Despite asthma, Kerrey was on the basketball, football, golf and swim teams. At 150 pounds, he was at least 30 pounds too light to be playing center, but by his senior year, he was the football team’s starter.

Hell-Raising Times

He wanted to work behind the pharmacy counter of a drugstore right there in Nebraska. For college, Kerrey went across town to the University of Nebraska. He joined, and later became president of, a fraternity known mostly for hell-raising.

His grades were good and he finished the university’s five-year pharmacy program in four. By the fall of 1965, the realities of Vietnam had crept as far as Nebraska, and notice arrived that Kerrey was to report for his draft physical.

His asthma might have been a legitimate way out of the service. Instead, he enlisted in the Navy as an officer candidate, which shocked the guys back at the fraternity house. This was the same Bob Kerrey whose ROTC record was so abysmal that he spent 250 hours walking “tours” around a city block-sized building near campus. For one inspection, he showed up with only one boot, because he could not find the other.

“The only class I ever came close to failing was ROTC,” Kerrey admits. “I didn’t exactly have a military demeanor.”

Many Navy officers saw Vietnam only from the deck of a ship, but the boy from landlocked Nebraska wanted something more exciting and dangerous. He signed up for underwater demolition.

Mike Ambrose, the second-in-command the night Kerrey was wounded, recalls that of the 5,000 men who applied for underwater demolition training, 197 were selected and only 60 or so made it through the brutal training program in Southern California. They swam in icy water without wet suits and trained for six consecutive days with almost no sleep.

“For 18 weeks, they tried to make you say, ‘I quit,’ ” says Ambrose, who is now an executive with a deep-sea diving firm in Houston.

Kerrey relished it. His sole act of insubordination came when instructors insisted they resume training immediately after two fellow trainees drowned during an exercise in the Pacific. Kerrey refused, and won a break in honor of two lost friends.

Upon finishing the program, Kerrey was one of two officers from his training class selected for a still-secret counterinsurgent group. The Navy called them SEAL teams, an acronym for sea, air and land. They were to be assassins--men who could fight as guerrillas, who could emerge from the night to kill an enemy with a knife across the throat, then melt back into the jungle.

And that was the job ahead for Lt. Kerrey when he arrived in Vietnam in January, 1969.

Zero Hour Arrives

Three months later, Kerrey’s squad was watching a John Wayne movie at an outdoor theater around Cam Ranh Bay, when orders came to report immediately to Nha Trang, a little to the north. Guided by two Vietnamese defectors, they were to capture or kill a group of Viet Cong political leaders and North Vietnamese Army sappers camped on a nearby island.

From the start, little went according to their hastily drawn plan. The first thing the SEALs encountered was a 350-foot cliff they had not known about. Lacking proper equipment, they scaled it hand over hand.

The enemy was said to be in two camps, so the team split, with one half to be led by Kerrey, the other by Ambrose. “The idea was for Bob to get set up around one and me to get set up around the other . . . and then we would simultaneously engage,” Ambrose says.

Holding each other by the belt, the SEALs inched into the moonless night. “Suddenly, the (defector) in front of me broke to the left and ran off,” Ambrose says. “But I had to go on, not knowing where the hell I was going.”

Ambrose learned soon enough, when his head bumped something soft that turned out to be an enemy soldier sleeping in a hammock. They had found the camp, all right, and when they heard others rolling from their racks to the ground, “I made the decision and I opened fire. I was on full automatic and they were shooting like hell,” Ambrose says.

In the distance, Ambrose heard an explosion and saw the light of tracers. Kerrey’s group was now engaged as well.

A minute and a half later, the firefight was over, with seven enemy killed. Kerrey was badly wounded, hit when a grenade bounced off another SEAL. His right leg wrapped in a tourniquet made from a parachute cord, and bleeding from shrapnel in his groin, chest and face, the lieutenant refused morphine. “He was still fully conscious, still directing, ‘Get your guys here. Get your guys there,’ ” Ambrose says.

The wound landed Kerrey in Philadelphia for nine months, during which he got a view of the war that would forever change his thinking. It was, he often says, “the most important experience of my life.”

Jim Crotty, a badly burned Marine helicopter pilot, was Kerrey’s roommate. “What he saw when he arrived at the hospital was room after room of people maimed like you wouldn’t believe,” Crotty says. “Every night, we would watch the wives come in and watch them sit on the bed of someone they used to know.”

Then there were the “stump rounds,” starting each morning at 9. As doctors went from bed to bed ripping off old dressings and applying new ones to the helpless warriors, “you could tell where they were on the floor by the screams you would hear,” says Crotty, now a lawyer near Philadelphia.

But when it came Kerrey’s turn, he would never utter a sound, or accept painkillers. In his autobiography “Fortunate Son,” double-amputee Lewis B. Puller Jr. recalled: “His stoicism, though unnerving, was a source of amazement to all. . . . We wanted to see him more comfortable and to have our view confirmed that morphine was indispensable to recovery. Instead, Bob asked for a fungo bat with which to beat back the phantom pains in his missing limb.”

Puller wrote that Kerrey also started a private rebellion on the ward. He insisted on playing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” at decibel levels as he asked fellow patients to snap Instamatic pictures of what remained of his leg to send to the American Legion back home.

It was in Philadelphia that Kerrey and the other wounded first began to seriously question the war itself. Each day, hospital volunteers would distribute a local newspaper, which listed the latest casualty counts on the front page.

As he took his first few outings beyond the walls of the hospital, Kerrey began to hear what Americans were saying about the war. Once at a movie theater, and another time at a track meet, strangers confronted him as though he were responsible for the whole mess.

Parallels to Gulf War

“It’s important to say to young people who went over to the Persian Gulf, ‘You went over there for us. We know that there were a lot of Iraqi soldiers who died and we regret that, but that’s not your responsibility. You fought for us,’ ” Kerrey now says. “Well, in Vietnam, that didn’t happen. You’d come back and people would call you a baby killer and they’d say you shouldn’t have killed in the first place.”

Ambrose had written Kerrey up for a Silver Star, but officials in Saigon rewrote the report and upgraded the recommendation to a Navy Cross. Then, someone in Washington rewrote it again, and Kerrey was being offered the Medal of Honor.

Kerrey’s first impulse was to reject it. Many, he now knew, had suffered far more than he did without any recognition. He told friends that he believed the medal was about politics, not valor; someone in Washington had decided that an unpopular war needed a few more heroes.

Others suspected that as well. “Does it sound like a (Medal of Honor) operation to you?” Ambrose asks. “Think of the era Bob and I grew up in. God, we saw Audie Murphy kill 500 guys. . . . This wasn’t the same thing.”

But his fellow SEALs talked him into accepting it, saying he would be wearing it for all of them. In a White House ceremony on May 14, 1970--barely a week after four students were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam protest at Kent State--President Richard M. Nixon pinned the nation’s highest decoration for bravery on Bob Kerrey.

Even as the stench of his own burning flesh filled his nostrils on that island in Nha Trang, Kerrey would later say, “I remember most vividly . . . that I knew I was going home, and how happy I was with that certainty.”

But after Philadelphia, nothing was certain any more. He was in constant pain, depressed and confused. He consulted for a restaurant company and worked briefly as a hospital pharmacist, only to discover he could not stand up as many hours as the job required. He considered selling insurance, rejected it and enrolled in courses at the University of Nebraska, including one on revolution.

Kerrey came to California in 1970 intending to get a masters degree in business administration at Stanford University. But a few days before fall classes were to start, he abruptly withdrew and headed instead for Berkeley with thoughts of taking some courses and becoming a teacher.

Downplays His Woes

These days, Kerrey is sensitive when asked about those days after Philadelphia, and he downplays his internal turmoil. “What I did was shut down for three years,” he insists. “There wasn’t some great life quest going on here. It was mostly trying to regain some physical strength and physical health.”

But others saw it differently. Oscar Pemantle, his teacher in a course called “The Quest for Authentic Self in Literature,” says: “My own feeling is that the atmosphere in Berkeley brought him here. The whole place was alive. People were searching. It was a time for exploration for new ways.”

The class was a revelation for Kerrey, whose college reading had been confined to scientific texts, and it gave him a love for literature. Pemantle lost track of his student, and was startled to receive a letter 14 years later from the governor of Nebraska, who wrote that the class had “the most profound impact on the way I read, listen and think.”

Today, Kerrey explains: “I thought I could read up to that time, and discovered not only that I couldn’t but discovered that when I made the effort to pay attention, that there’s great language there. . . . You could learn from it, you could discover it, if you engage in that way. You can discover something about yourself.”

His favorite work is Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” a novel whose central character is an alienated Korean War veteran.

He also loves and even writes poetry. In the tense hours before a recent debate among the Democratic candidates, Kerrey spent time with a volume of Robert Frost. He was particularly taken with a poem called “Bereft,” which concludes:

“Word I was in the house alone

Somehow must have gotten abroad,

Word I was in my life alone,

Word I had no one left but God.”

Returns to Nebraska

In the spring of 1971, Kerrey left Berkeley as abruptly as he had arrived there and returned to Nebraska. Again he held a string of jobs, lasting a few months at each. He was fired from one pharmacy when he decided to take the visiting Crotty to a football game rather than show up for work.

Kerrey also spoke out about his disillusionment with the war. He appeared at an anti-war rally on the State Capitol steps but says he never felt comfortable with the movement as a whole because it seemed anti-veteran as well.

More satisfying was working for the late New York Rep. Allard K. Lowenstein’s drive to stop the war by registering 18-year-olds to vote. “Had I not gotten married, I probably would have run off and gone to work for Lowenstein or something like that,” he says.

Instead, he and brother-in-law Dean Rasmussen, who had married his sister, Jessie, started a restaurant in 1973, having decided that Omaha needed something a cut or two above fast food, but not as formal or expensive as the city’s fancy steakhouses. When Grandmother’s Skillet opened, Kerrey and Rasmussen did almost everything, from bartending to flipping burgers to scrubbing pots.

About that time, Kerrey married Beverly Defnall, a girl from Lincoln. Soon, their first child, Ben, arrived. A daughter, Lindsey, was born two years later.

Kerrey says now that Ben’s birth marked the first moment he felt truly healed. “I cried and jumped up and down, the first time I ever loved absolutely,” he says. “The same sensation with my daughter two years later. It was a miracle.”

But Kerrey was too obsessed with getting his business going to serve as devoted husband and father. “The night we got home from our honeymoon, he left and went to the restaurant. I was sitting on my suitcase. I said to myself: ‘I think I’m in big trouble here,’ ” his ex-wife told the Omaha World-Herald last year. She declined to be interviewed for this story.

The couple split up after four years, but their relationship today appears amicable, and Kerrey seems close to his children. Beverly Higby, who remarried and divorced again, appeared on the platform when Kerrey announced his bid for President, and more recently she attended the Super Bowl with him and their two teen-age children.

Kerrey Is Millionaire

A 1975 tornado destroyed the restaurant, but the partners rebuilt with a government loan. Today, they have eight restaurants and three health clubs in Nebraska. With those and other investments, Kerrey is a millionaire.

In 1982, with his life seemingly back on track, Kerrey surprised almost everyone he knew when he announced plans to run for governor as a Democrat. He had worked in other people’s campaigns and often contributed money, but had not done much politicking beyond that. Even today, he is unsure when he switched his voter registration from Republican.

“Apparently, in 1978,” he says. A decade earlier, he had voted for Nixon.

He mapped campaign strategy at the Rasmussens’ dining room table. “People really did laugh at us,” his sister, Jessie, says.

One who did not find it very funny was incumbent Republican Charles Thone, who already was beset by a farm depression. The governor got his first look at his younger, more vigorous foe on television. “I turned to someone and said, ‘Uh-oh, we got a battle here,” Thone recalled in an interview with the World-Herald. “Kerrey came on just like a Hollywood personality. . . . (He) didn’t know an ear of corn from a ukulele, but he came across on television as if he really knew exactly what he was doing and what he would do as governor.”

Kerrey beat Thone by just over 7,000 votes, hardly a mandate. Once in office, his major accomplishment was turning a $24-million state deficit into a $49-million surplus--a feat he accomplished by slashing the budgets of importance to many of the groups that had supported him.

Still, Nebraskans loved their young governor. Those who worked with Kerrey say he would have accomplished far more had the state’s economy not been in a tailspin. “It was sort of a Camelot, but it was a Camelot with no money,” says Renee Wessels, who was Kerrey’s press secretary.

Kerrey’s Guinevere was Debra Winger, whom he met while she was in the state filming “Terms of Endearment.” When she began spending nights at the governor’s mansion, aides were horrified--surely, a state as conservative as Nebraska would not accept such behavior. But a poll showed 76% saw nothing wrong with it, and Kerrey quipped that more people approved of her being there than him.

Nebraska Republicans say today that glamour masked a notably weak record. “I don’t know whether it was the charisma, or the Medal of Honor or Debra Winger,” says Nebraska GOP Chairman Jerald Schenken. “His record as governor was never examined, politically.”

Worse, opponents contend, his personal appeal made it possible for Kerrey to deflect scandal. One of Kerrey’s close advisers was found to have drained a savings and loan and cut the governor in on a questionable shopping mall acquisition. When a health club that Kerrey owned ran into financial difficulty, it was aided by a state agency which the governor had created, and which was run by a board that Kerrey appointed.

Authorities looking into his dealings have found no wrongdoing. Yet Kerrey, who put his holdings in a blind trust in 1984, conceded that he should have been more sensitive to appearances of conflicts of interest.

In 1985, with polls showing his popularity above 70%, Kerrey suddenly announced he would not seek another term. Some thought his breakup with Winger was to blame. But most were mystified, their confusion compounded by the view that he never offered what seemed an adequate explanation.

He told one interviewer that his heart just was not in the job any more. To another, he said: “I need to find a little danger.”

But to still another, he suggested that he was far from finished with politics. “You want an example that is heady as hell?” he asked. “Look at Thomas Jefferson. Two terms as governor of Virginia, left it, depressed, despondent, couldn’t wait to get back to the farm.

“Ended up being President.”

Less than a week after leaving office in 1987, Kerrey reported to the University of California at Santa Barbara to begin a stint teaching Walter Capps’ class on the Vietnam War.

Capps says Kerrey would go on at length about tactics, strategy, foreign policy and history, but refused to discuss his own experiences with pain and disillusionment. The students, however, pressed him for a more personal view of the war.

One day, Kerrey paused and told them about a ballad called “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” about an Australian soldier whose legs were blown off at Gallipoli. Offering Capps only a glance as warning of what he intended to do, Kerrey started singing:

“Then a big Turkey shell knocked me ass over head

And when I awoke in my hospital bed

I saw what it had done

And I wished I were dead

Never knew there were worse things than dying . . . .

No more waltzing Matilda for me.

After he returned to Nebraska to run for the Senate, he sang it again on election night at a celebration of his overwhelming victory. He dedicated the song to the other SEALs who had worked on his campaign.

For all his earlier reluctance, Kerrey now speaks so often of the personal odyssey stemming from his Vietnam experience that some say it is getting stale. During the first nationally televised debate in December, Kerrey brought up the war no fewer than four times.

Makes No Excuses

He makes no excuses for now focusing on that period of his life, saying “it affects the way I feel. I was saved by government. It’s fair to say it almost killed me just ahead of it. That’s part of the ambivalence we have with our government.”

If he has a fixation on Vietnam, it is far from his only problem in a presidential race plagued by gaffes and missteps from the start. The first many Americans learned of Kerrey was his telling of an off-color joke about lesbians, which he did not know was being picked up on an open C-SPAN microphone. Later, it was revealed that the candidate spotlighting health care reform does not provide health insurance for all his workers. His restaurants also were cited for numerous child-labor law violations.

In speeches, Kerrey likens himself to Luke Wingo, his favorite character in Pat Conroy’s novel, “The Prince of Tides.” A former SEAL, Wingo fought to keep a government nuclear materials plant out of his beloved South Carolina low country.

But as Kerrey knows, that is not the whole story. Wingo was ultimately defeated, not only in his drive to stop the project but in a far more profound sense.

Conroy writes of Wingo: “The metaphors that had sustained him in the early days of his dispute had lost their freshness. . . . In his deepest self, he did not understand why every American did not join him on the islands when they heard about the nature of his disenchantment with the government.”

Until now, the metaphors of his early days have worked for Kerrey, as they never did for Wingo. Sometimes, breathtakingly so. In general, he has made little impression during his brief Senate career. But debating a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning in 1989, his own experiences told him there was something sanctimonious about the talk of dead heroes who had sacrificed all for the flag.

“My country called, and I went,” the freshman senator declared. “In the short time I was there, I don’t remember giving the safety of our flag anywhere near the thought that I gave the safety of our men.

“I do remember thinking about going home, and I remember why that home felt so good to me,” Kerrey said. “ . . . America, the home of the free and the brave, does not need our government to protect us from those who burn a flag.”

Senate leaders say Kerrey’s speech marked a turning point. The amendment died.

Medal of Honor Winner Aims for the Presidency

Kerrey’s Background

Born: Aug. 27, 1943, in Lincoln, Neb. One of seven children of James Kerrey, a builder, and Elinor Kerrey, a homemaker and later an instructor at the University of Nebraska.

Education: Graduated University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1966, with a degree in pharmacy.

Military Service: U.S. Navy, 1966-1969. Sea/Air/Land special operations unit. Wounded in Vietnam, March 14, 1969. Awarded Medal of Honor on May 14, 1970.

Family: Married Beverly Kay Defnall, 1974. Divorced in 1978. Two children, Benjamin, 17, and Lindsey, 15, who live with their mother in Omaha.

Career: With his brother-in-law, opened first Grandmother’s Skillet restaurant in 1972. Business has grown to a chain of eight restaurants and three health clubs in Omaha and Lincoln. Nebraska governor, 1983-1987. U.S. Senate, 1989-present.

Major Campaign Themes

* Drastic overhaul of the national health care system. He says his plan would guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of whether they were employed, in part by substituting a payroll tax for private premiums and shifting revenues from Medicare, Medicaid, military and civil service benefits. He claims the typical family would save $500 annually.

* Reducing the number of Cabinet departments from 14 to seven. The departments would be: Defense, State, Justice, Treasury, Human Resources, Natural Resources and Economic Policy. He says the reorganization would provide better coordination and save 25% in non-entitlement federal spending over the next decade.

* Middle-class tax relief, to be provided by increasing taxes on the wealthy.

* A tougher U.S. trade policy with Japan. Supports restoration of “Super 301” legislation giving the President broader powers to retaliate against other countries whose trade practices are deemed unfair. Backs U.S. free-trade negotiations with Mexico and Canada.

* Increased spending on communications and transportation infrastructure. Would pay for it by cutting defense spending.