The company needed a site that had strong winds, shallow water and low waves. One place had all three: Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. As a bonus, said Rodgers, the site also was "outside the ferry routes, outside the shipping lanes, and outside the flight paths."

Rodgers refused to comment about Kerry's position on the project.

But for the politically minded, Cape Wind also seems a perfect match for Kerry's energy plan. If completed, it will provide, on average, three quarters of the power consumed on Cape Cod and the nearby islands.

Today, the closest energy source to Kerry's Nantucket home and the Kennedys' Hyannisport compound is an oil burning plant at Sandwich, Mass. Last April, a barge bringing fuel to that plant ruptured, spilling from 35,000 to 55,000 gallons of oil into a bay off the Cape. Birds were killed, shellfish beds closed.

With Cape Wind, the Kennedys and Kerrys could light up their lives with clean renewable wind-power instead of dirty fossil-fuel power. The risk to U.S. troops -- as envisioned by Kerry's stump speeches -- would be diminished.

But Cape Wind has a one big drawback for Massachusetts liberals: It's not in Iowa. You would actually see it from some mansions along Nantucket Sound.

Sen. Ted Kennedy won't have it. He's flatly opposed. But he's not running for president on a wind-farm platform.

In December, in New Hampshire, when asked his position on wind power, Kerry brought up Cape Wind. "I am in favor of wind power, and I think we ought to find a place that is appropriate off the coast of New England to build some wind power," the Manchester Union-Leader reported him saying. "The question is, what is the site process going to be? You can't just allow anybody to go build one anywhere they want without some kind of process."

Despite his plan to make 20 percent of our electricity come from renewable sources by 2020, Kerry apparently intends to make it harder, not easier, to build wind farms.

And just as he might have been for some war to oust Saddam, but not the one America fought, so he is for a New England wind farm, but not necessarily the one they would build in his backyard.