SHOULD JOHN F. KERRY--war hero, four-term senator from Massachusetts--become the Democratic party's nominee for president, he will likely appear to the nation about as thoughtful as the lines of his ponderously creased face, especially when his gently modulated utterances are compared to the staccato certainties of President Bush. One imagines him aiming to appear serious and, at least some of the time, succeeding.

But a reading of Kerry's one effort to articulate in writing the sum of his thoughts on a major policy issue, his 1997 book "The New War: The Web of Crime that Threatens America's Security," suggests the senator's chin-stroking is something of an air. "The New War" reads not (as it supposed to) like a policy professional's distillation of years' worth of investigation into a matter of grave importance (and whose attendant problems legislation has been loath to solve), but like a clip job glued together by a shop of research elves whose main priorities were to make the senator look good and give the story sizzle.

Kerry is too subtle, however, to go on and on about himself directly; rather he positions himself in relation to his material, whose shock value depends on the reader not being much of a student of the subject. Most of the book is taken up with the journalistic task of establishing what is already known and making it compelling; many newspaper articles were Xeroxed in the making of this book. Where the book is something beyond a primer, the reader learns little about

A host of venial sins show Kerry to be free from the leash of self-doubting irony, like the gritty photo of the author on the book's cover and the headers on each page, reminding the reader not what chapter he is in, but that he is reading the words of "Senator John Kerry." Pomposity too shines through, with Kerry's many references to his own résumé as the high Democrat on the totem pole of the Senate subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations.

LIKE A LOT OF JOURNALISM, Kerry's writing (so to speak, a full bench of researchers and writers are mentioned in the acknowledgements) reveals a weakness for the melodramatic, as when Kerry approvingly cites a witness to the brutality of a Colombian drug cartel. The witness tells the senator that he would be amazed at the number of Western officials the cartel had bought off. This vague and subjectively-phrased claim, which appears without quotes, is reminiscent of the prostitute's cliché that you'd be shocked by the number of judges and politicians in her clientele. In both cases, the claimant (whose virtue is hardly unquestionable) pretends to a secret knowledge to which the rest of us are supposedly and conveniently blind. Nor does Kerry bother to verify the claim of a hacker who says he can break the law with just "five strokes of a keyboard." And so on. China is called "the most corrupt society on earth," and uncheckably, uselessly, the reader is told Russian Mafia "will occupy Western Europe." Kerry is a cynical reporter, happy to retail any quotes that make it sound like he's got the real skinny, even if he has nothing hard.