Lately I find myself feeling the need to give John Kerry advice.

He's slipping in the polls and I really can't say I want the guy to be our next president.

But it amazes me sometimes how a dumb, unenlightened Hoosier like me can see things so clearly that seem to elude Kerry's campaign advisers.

Last Saturday night, former President Clinton - before undergoing quadruple bypass surgery - called Kerry and told him he needed to stop talking about Vietnam and start talking about domestic issues.

(That, not so coincidentally, is exactly what I told Kerry in my column of Aug. 28. I suppose Kerry didn't read it, though.)

Kerry decided that's probably a good idea, so now he's on a domestic issue - the economy. Well, not so much the economy. It's jobs.

OK, here's some more advice. To run on a huge job problem, there first must be a huge job problem.

And there simply isn't.

Unemployment is trending downward and is sitting at 5.4 percent. That is not a huge job problem.

And take a look at some other sectors of the economy.

Housing starts, up; new and existing home sales, up; home ownership at record levels; seasonally adjusted annual average of real disposable income, up 0.1 percent as of July; producer price inflation, 2.5 percent; consumer price inflation, 1.6 percent; compensation per hour, change from four quarters earlier, up 4.2 percent; index of leading economic indicators, 116 in July, up from 111 at the beginning of 2003.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

But to hear the Democrats talk, you would think we were all eating cold beans straight from the can with our fingers. And we had to open the can with a stick.

If John Kerry needs issues to resonate for his campaign, I really don't think jobs or the economy are the ones he should be talking about.

Really, who's he going to reach. The 5.4 percent of us who are unemployed?

And Kerry frankly can't say too much about Iraq, either, but he does anyway.

I heard him talking about how W loused up the Iraq war and how he (Kerry) never would have gone to war under those circumstances.

And yeah, I supposed that would be a legitimate position to take against W. One could make a principled argument along those lines.

But not Kerry.

That's because, as a senator, he voted to authorize the war.

Kerry supporters like to say that, sure, he authorized the war, but he wouldn't have if he'd known that W was going to war without a large international coalition, without proof of weapons of mass destruction, without more inspections, blah, blah, blah.

And that could have been a principled argument, too, except that Kerry - just a little while ago - said he'd still have voted to give the president the authority to invade Iraq even knowing what he knows now.

And frankly, Kerry's position on Iraq - when it stops oscillating - isn't that much different than W's.

The only consistency in his policy on Iraq is his aversion to accountability. It was easy to vote to authorize the war. It puts all the responsibility and accountability on the president. But does it, really? Aren't those who vote "yea" just as accountable?

Here's what the resolution said:

"The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."

Pretty straightforward stuff. Seems pretty clear. Remember all those U.N. resolutions Saddam thumbed his nose at?

There were some senators making a principled argument against giving W the authority to invade Iraq, but Kerry wasn't one of them. There were some no votes. But Kerry wasn't one of them, either.

So Kerry votes yes and ducks the war responsibility. He leaves that up to W.

Then he blames W for botching the war and points out, of course, it would have been much better if he was running things.

No, the war probably isn't the best thing for Kerry to run on either.

And the health care thing. That's just another huge budget busting government program. He shouldn't be running on a plan to spend lots more tax dollars.

What to do?

Well, he goes out and hires CNN political correspondents Paul Begalla and James Carville as campaign strategists. (I have a little problem with the ethics of that, but that's a whole different column.)

That seems like another dumb move. Those guys - ardent, firebrand liberals - will make his campaign track to the left when it needs to track to the center. Those guys attract the core Democrats, the party's base, but those are the people who already will vote for Kerry.

So here's what he needs to do.

He needs to focus on the deficit and Social Security and the expansion of government.

He needs to explain that things like the USA PATRIOT Act, (did you know that's an acronym? It's the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" Act. Amazing) No Child Left Behind, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit are big, expensive, unnecessary and largely ineffective expansions of government.

He needs to point out that paying for all those programs and a war at the same time will run up the deficit.

He needs to say that he will cut taxes even more to stimulate the economy and raise revenues to the treasury.

He needs to say he will streamline or eliminate lots of expensive government programs.

He needs to say he'll divert funds back into the Social Security "trust fund."

He should vow to follow through on the war thing to be sure there are stable, elected governments in Iraq and Afghanistan because that is good for the whole world.

He should say, given the war and the deficit and everything else going on these days, that if elected, he would declare a moratorium on new government programs for a least a year.

He could explain that tough times require sacrifices from all of us and until we get through this rough patch, government will be running lean and mean.

"Read my lips, no new government programs" could be his slogan.

I know. Fat chance.

But that's a John Kerry I could vote for. [[In-content Ad]]