The senator who last ran for president in a general election was Senator Dole of Kansas. And it was about this season — May 15, 1996, to be exact — that Mr. Dole realized that he couldn’t serve in the Senate and run for president at the same time. “I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people and nowhere to go but the White House or home,” Mr. Dole said on May 15, 1996, explaining, “The very least a presidential candidate owes America is his full attention.”

We were reminded of Mr. Dole’s bold decision of 8 years ago yesterday by a dispatch from Washington of the Associated Press. It reported that yesterday the Senate “by a single vote rejected”an effort to extend federal unemployment benefits. The AP reported that Senator Kerry of Massachusetts,”the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was the only senator who missed the vote.” Mr. Kerry was campaigning yesterday in Kentucky. So some million jobless Americans will lack unemployment benefits because Mr. Kerry was off campaigning rather than doing his job as a senator. It makes all Mr. Kerry’s campaigning about President Bush being blind to the plight of the jobless seem more than a little thin.

Mr. Kerry is drawing a full salary from the taxpayers as a senator. Clearly his priorities are elsewhere. Yesterday’s vote on unemployment was not the first vote he missed. A Republican National Committee count as of March 5 found that Mr. Kerry had missed 65% of the votes in the second session of the 108th Congress, 317 votes. Few of the missed votes affected the final outcome, but yesterday’s did. In the first session of the 108th Congress, Mr. Kerry missed 292 of 459 votes.

Mr. Kerry’s absenteeism is depriving the people of Massachusetts of the representation they deserve in Congress. When he does show up for work in the Senate, he’s depriving the Democratic Party of his full attention as a campaigning candidate. Now George W. Bush managed to govern Texas while campaigning in 2000, and Senator Clinton managed to represent New York while writing a book on the side. Sometimes, as in the case of yesterday’s unemployment benefits vote, Mr. Kerry’s absence from the Senate actually helps the conservative policy agenda. Still, by Mr. Kerry’s example so far, it’s hard to argue with Mr. Dole’s idea that a senator who wants to run for president owes it to the country to step aside so that someone else can represent his constituents in the upper chamber.