DEMOCRATS and Republicans may clash over who did what when they put on military uniforms. They may disagree about where on their shirts to wear religion. But they are all but united in their taste in neckties.

The bright, whimsically patterned ties made by Vineyard Vines, featuring whales, sailboats, golf clubs and other emblems of the good life, preppy division, have become a visible statement in Washington's political class.

''If I see someone in Washington wearing a Vineyard Vines tie, I think they are in politics — a politician, a lobbyist or an intern,'' said Jim McKenry, who owns a tie distribution company. ''It's a good look for a lot less money, and it tells a story.''

High-profile wearers include John Kerry, the first President Bush, Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. They are also widely spotted on staff members of both campaigns, in K Street lobbying shops and in the White House. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, recently sent a note to the company, thanking it for a gift tie. ''I'll wear it with pride at the upcoming convention,'' he wrote.

In Washington, where the corridors are awash in a sea of blue and gray suits, and neckwear varies between stripes and solids, the playful patterns of Vineyard Vines ties, which resemble those found on boxer shorts, pass for daring fashion.

''They are breezy but bold, cool but confident, sporty but spunky,'' said Jonathan Grella, the spokesman for Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader. Mr. Grella owns about 20 of the ties.

Yet when the Republicans go to New York this week, they may find local fashion mavens arching their eyebrows over this stab at bold fashion. ''It's perfect for Washington because it's not a city where guys are going to get ahead by being really stylish — it's about conforming,'' said Wendell Brown, the senior fashion editor for Esquire. ''A tie is so much more noncommittal than a radical suit or a pants cut or something like that.''

Michael Hainey, the deputy editor of GQ, added, ''They're a limp way for a guy who has to wear a boring suit to add some 'personality.' ''

In other words, the ties are for those men who like to stay within the box but do not like to acknowledge there is one. This personality profile seems common in Washington, judging by the number of men who have a dozen-plus Vineyard Vines ties in their closets, many of them gifts from Washington women.

This narrow zone for expressing individuality suits many Washingtonians just fine. ''This is a brand that has clearly bridged a gap: the economic value that Democrats like and the elegance that Republicans like,'' said Tripp Donnelly, a Democrat who is president of the Capitol Club, a bipartisan Washington fraternity of sorts, minus the Greek letters, which has ordered custom-made Vineyard Vines ties showing the club's logo: the Capitol dome flipped over as a wine glass.

Vineyard Vines's most prominent patron is Mr. Kerry, who once favored French Hermès ties, but started appearing almost exclusively in Vineyard Vines neckwear last year after the European provenances of his ties came under scrutiny by journalists. (At $64 each, Vineyard Vines ties are also less elitist than the $120-plus numbers from Ferragamo and Hermès, some argue.) Mr. Kerry's Vines collection includes ties with lacrosse sticks, parrots and palms, hot-air balloons and seashells. He even helped design a custom Vineyard Vines campaign tie with JK04 logos, which are passed out sparingly.

''They're nice ties,'' Mr. Kerry said in a recent interview on his choice of neckwear. ''I don't go shopping a lot. They're easy to get, on the Internet.''

Mr. Kerry points out to reporters that his ties are made in America, and in a year when outsourcing has become a controversial issue, the homegrown, entrepreneurial story of the company has a great deal of appeal. Based in Greenwich, Conn., Vineyard Vines was started with $8,000 in credit-card debt by two brothers, Ian and Shep Murray, who gave up their jobs as investment bankers six years ago. The ties gained popularity with politicians in part because so many vacation in Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, where they were originally sold.

''Our ties are representative of the good life, and a lot of people associated time on the beach or time on the water with the good life,'' Ian Murray said.

Kerry: “Sgt. Damon is a reminder of what Veterans Day is all about”

**Picture available upon request***

Washington, DC – Senator John Kerry today viewed Iraqi War Veteran Peter Damon’s artwork which is on display in our nation’s capitol. Kerry invited Damon to display his artwork in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington all week.

Damon, a Sergeant in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, lost both of his hands in Iraq in 2003.

“Sergeant Damon’s work is amazing. It’s well beyond inspirational to think that after losing both of his hands in Iraq, Peter didn’t give up and he pushed himself through rehabilitation and today produces these incredible paintings. For anyone who has ever been discouraged or demoralized by life’s ups and downs, Peter is a living, breathing lesson about finding goodness and beauty in the face of loss. I’m happy to have played some small role in bringing him to Washington so that he can share his artwork with the Senate. Peter and thousands of veterans like him in the Wounded Warrior Project embody the strength of the human spirit, and they are reminders to all of us about what this Veterans Day is all about,” said Senator Kerry.

But after an accident in Iraq ripped off Damon's arms and killed his comrade in 2003, creating soft-hued seascapes and suburban scenes with a brush or pencil clamped in his prosthesis has helped this Brockton native cope with his mental trauma, overcome his injury, and reclaim his civilian life after the war.

"When I picked up a pencil [after the accident] I was elated that I could still do it. It gave me the strength to keep going on," Damon, 35, said yesterday at a gallery for beginning artists that he and his wife, Jenn, founded in Middleborough, where he now lives.

Today, Damon's art goes on display in the Rotunda of the US Capitol, where Senator John F. Kerry has invited Damon to show his work for five days beneath the frescoed canopy depicting President Washington ascending into the clouds. It is the first time that Damon, a self-taught artist, has exhibited his work in a public space.

"Peter is a living, breathing lesson about finding goodness and beauty in the face of loss," Kerry said through a press secretary Saturday.

Damon enlisted in the National Guard in 2000. In October 2003, when Damon was inflating a tire of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with high-pressure nitrogen at the US military Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, the tire and the rim of the wheel blew apart. The rim killed Damon's partner, Alabama Army National Guard Specialist Paul Bueche, who was 19 years old.

The force of the explosion tore off Damon's left wrist and his right arm above the elbow, and knocked him unconscious.

"When I came to I knew that something terrible had happened, and when I realized it was my arms the first thing that came to my mind was: How am I gonna work? Am I gonna be homeless? Then I found out that Bueche had been killed." Damon paused. "He was a lot younger than me. I think about it a lot."

While Damon spent more than a year recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, the government supplied him with a set of prosthetic arms and a set of hooks. Damon chose to wear only one hook, attached to his left elbow.

"There's no elbow left to attach the hook to on the right arm," he said.

Born right-handed, Damon taught himself to be a leftie.

Damon was still at the hospital when he taught himself to use the hook to pick up and use a pencil, practicing every night in his room. When he returned home, he started working in pastels. Recently, he attended two workshops for amateur artists and started painting in oil and watercolor.

"Having these skills makes me feel more normal," Damon said. "It's been great therapy for me."

Damon's art displayed in the Rotunda this week is light, almost ethereal. One pastel, titled "Fishing Off Falmouth," depicts the back of a broad-shouldered man fishing on a rocky beach, his white T-shirt ruffled by a breeze. A raspberry cloud bisects the turquoise sky and a white sailboat slices through the dark ocean water.

The fisherman's arms are bent at the elbows. His hands are invisible.

Damon said he used to draw a lot as a child, and started drawing again when he deployed to the Middle East. Before he was sent to Iraq, Damon had spent five months on a US military base in Kuwait, where he had a lot of time to spare.

"I built myself a little drawing table, my wife sent me some colored drawing pencils, and I started drawing," he said. He lost his hands six months later.

After Damon returned from Walter Reed, a Taunton-based nonprofit organization called Homes for Our Troops built him, free of charge, a house designed in such a way that Damon does not need to use his hands. The Damons live there with their two children, Allura, 10, and Daniel, 5.

Without a mortgage, and using the insurance money Damon got from the government for his injury, the couple opened the Middleborough Art Gallery a year ago.

"He's done a beautiful job with that gallery," said Norma Brown, an artist who displays her work there.

When Damon paints, he picks subjects that "conjure good childhood memories," he said: children at an ice cream truck, a grandfather enjoying a day off. He does not paint war scenes.