From this column. It's hard to tell what she thinks of the Gore speech. Does she prefer the raging, pulpit-pounding, shouting kind of politician to Kerry's dull vacancy? You know...more of a Fuehrer-type personality?

John Kerry's advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don't want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party.

They would like Mr. Gore, who brought bad karma to Mr. Dean with his primary endorsement, to zip it and go away. But more and more Democrats think it is Mr. Kerry who should zip it and go away.

Mr. Kerry has made a huge $25 million ad buy in recent weeks, believing that the better voters know him, the more they'll like him. But many Democrats fear he's one of those supercilious/smarmy candidates (like Al Gore) for whom the opposite is true: the more you know him, the less you want to see him.

They wonder whether Mr. Kerry should just let the campaign be Bush vs. Bush. As the president's old running buddy, Lee Atwater, used to say, don't get in the way when your rival's busy shooting himself.

Couldn't the Democratic standard-bearer use a William McKinley front-porch strategy, talking only to those who bother to show up at his front porch? After all, Mr. Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have five front porches, stretching from Sun Valley to Nantucket and Georgetown.

Mr. Kerry, once a critic of campaign financing abuses, had toyed with the idea of not accepting the nomination at his nominating convention so he could spend even more in contributions. While he announced yesterday that he had dropped that belittled idea, maybe he just didn't take the plan far enough.

Maybe he shouldn't go down from his town house on Beacon Hill to the Fleet Center at all. The conventioneers may be more galvanized if they focus on vividly vivisecting Mr. Bush, instead of being dulled to distraction by Mr. Kerry, waving stiffly in his Oxford-cloth shirt, trying to be all things to all people all the prime time.

The Democratic primaries were largely irrelevant. They could have picked someone out of a hat. Heck, they could have put a cardboard cutout up for president. The entire Democratic Party this year is not about policies, programs, ideas, or anything else like that. It's about hatred of Bush.