If that was Clinton's advice to Kerry, there's a problem: It's largely contrary to Kerry's instincts and ideology. The man is a liberal, with a Senate voting record more left-wing than even his mentor Teddy; he picked an almost equally far-out trial lawyer for a running-mate.
Move to the middle? That's tough for a leftist ideologue - one who believes. It's why Kerry has so much difficulty apologizing for those war-crimes charges before Congress in 1971 (he hasn't yet been able to bring himself to do so). It's why Kerry's phrase three days ago about Iraq - the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time - partially repeats a Kennedy phrase and identically repeats a Howard Dean phrase during the primaries when Kerry campaigned saying Dean was wrong about Iraq.
If Kerry is having difficulty honing his message and finding his campaign voice, it is because he is conflicted between what he believes and what the moderates on his staff - such as they are - are telling him to say. It is the problem Kerry has had throughout his political career: the disconnect between his ideology and what the voters beyond Massachusetts want to hear. It is why he has spoken and voted on so many sides of so many key questions - Iraq being Exhibit A.
So since talking to Clinton, Kerry has realigned his staff again, tried to redirect his campaign, tried to revise his message. On Iraq and the economy, it must not be easy: They are President Bush's strongest issues. How hard it must be to argue that unemployment is too high, given that at 5.4 percent the unemployment rate is identical to the rate in 1988 when Bush I was elected and to 1996 when Clinton was re-elected.
Kerry has taken to talking again about the evils of "outsourcing." He says the W in Bush's name stands for "wrong . . . wrong choices, wrong priorities, wrong direction for our country." He adds: Bush and his Vice President Cheney "have had four years and they've taken us backward." He terms Bush "hypocritical" on the subject of trial lawyers. To Cheney's comment that the election of Kerry-Edwards might make another terrorist attack on America more likely, Sen. (and trial lawyer) Edwards termed the comment "un-American."
During the primaries, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman warned - to no avail - that that his party was at risk of returning to its pre-Clinton leftism. Kerry and Edwards represent well what the national Democrats have become.
That leftism explains why Kerry, especially, has such trouble selling himself as the on-message moderate he is not. It explains why Democratic Sen. Zell Miller, responding to friends suggesting he might have used more humor during his crackerjack keynote speech at the Republican Convention, said the condition of the Democratic Party is nothing to laugh about. And it explains why Kerry is encountering, now, such hardscrabbling in the polls.