The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

Trouble for our favorite Botox Brahmin today, as his campaign staff is now in hot water, according to the NY Daily News...

Sen. John Kerry is angry at the way his campaign has botched the attacks from the Swift boat veterans and has ordered a staff shakeup that will put former Clinton aides in top positions.

"The candidate is furious," a longtime senior Kerry adviser told the Daily News. "He knows the campaign was wrong. He wanted to go after the Swift boat attacks, but his top aides said no."

Campaign sources stressed that no one is losing a job at this point, but instead "proven winners" like former Clinton aides Joe Lockhart and Joel Johnson are being brought in to try to regain momentum for Team Kerry.

Many Democrats have suggested that an overhaul of the Kerry "message machine" is seriously overdue.

Johnson is now running Kerry's war room, and Lockhart will be both a spokesman and strategist.

"Nobody is going over the side, but some people's stock has gone through the floor," a source said.

You know, I've often argued that Al Gore ran a for-crap campaign in 2000 because he was always undecided about how to handle his connection to Bill Clinton. But it's easy to focus on the staff and forget that it's the candidate himself who sets the tone for the campaign. Has the Bush campaign, despite difficulties and ups-and-downs, ever fired anyone? About the closest thing we've seen is the return of Karen Hughes as an advisor, but she's basically been in that role part-time anyway. Otherwise, Bush's campaign rolls along, projecting stability -- which comes from the top down. In 2000, Gore was switching strategies once a week, as he showed during the debates, when he went from Smart-Aleck Creep to Milquetoast Nerd to Uber-Alpha Male in the span of three weeks.

Kerry seems too cautious for the Gore strategy of changing personas every time he changes suits, but he also seems unwilling to admit the problem might be more basic than his staff. Further evidence of the real culprit appears in this CNN article...

Several campaign officials and advisers say they recognize the need to have an "adult" traveling with the candidate -- as one put it, "someone who can tell him to shut up, or change something if and when that is necessary" and quickly deal with other strategic issues from the road.

"The 'sky is falling' people are out of line, but we do need to fix some things," said one senior campaign official.

That might not be quite accurate. They may need to fix the candidate. Jokes aside, isn't this directly counter to the idea that Kerry and the Dems are the smarter party? You don't hear Bush staffers saying they need to send an "adult" on the road with the President. I guess Clinton's advisors might have spoken that way, but for different reasons.

In the end, Kerry really fits the character we've come to know. He has no message, shifts blame for his own mistakes, and lacks the ability to make decisions without consulting opinion polls and 1,000 advisors. Perhaps these might be good qualifications for a Senator from Massachusetts, but not for a prospective President.