Let Sleeping Pols Lie

By selecting John Edwards as his running mate, John Kerry is desperately trying to inject some fizz into a campaign that has been as flat as week-old Coca-Cola. How well will it work? Ask Bob Dole or Walter Mondale. Like Kerry, they were both boring Washington lifers who won their party's presidential nomination and then tried to wow the voters with an exciting veep pick. Dole went with Jack "Quarterback" Kemp, Mondale with Geraldine "First Female" Ferraro. So much for that theory.

No matter how much he campaigns with the honey-tongued wonder boy from North Carolina, or how often he replays his "Apocalypse Now" years, or how many skeet he slays, Kerry is not going to alter the public's basic perception: He's widely seen as aloof, arrogant, cerebral and a tad shifty. Sort of like Gray Davis without the charm.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. He should stop fighting his reputation and start embracing his inner policy analyst. That may be just what voters are looking for this year. As Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently wrote, "History has been too dramatic the past 3 1/2 years," what with terrorist attacks, two wars, a recession, transatlantic tiffs and all the rest. A lot of this excitement wasn't George W. Bush's fault, but people nevertheless associate him with the tumultuous times since 911. Voters may be ready, as Noonan suggests, for a less exciting alternative: a president who makes peace with France, doesn't polarize the planet, trims the budget deficit and eats his spinach.

Enter John Kerry. Since winning the primaries, the junior senator from Massachusetts has done a superb job of adopting the protective coloration of tapioca pudding. He's stopped railing against "Benedict Arnold CEOs" (a.k.a. campaign contributors), and he's no longer claiming that Bush is the worst leader since Caligula.

In place of those faux populist ravings designed to woo Deaniacs, he's adopted a centrist agenda so tame that it should pop up when you Google "snoozy."

I went to the Kerry website and clicked on the icon for "Fighting for American Jobs." Up came Kerry's promise to create "millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs in the industries of the future," which, I gather, will miraculously all be located in Stark County, Ohio, where he campaigned recently.