Shades of LBJ and Carter!

John Kerry is a micromanager, and, it sounds like, a lousy boss to work for. When he is so tonedeaf with the voters, it's pretty difficult to imagine him being anything else.

Mr. Kerry is a meticulous, deliberative decision maker, always demanding more information, calling around for advice, reading another document - acting, in short, as if he were still the Massachusetts prosecutor boning up for a case.

So, can we expect him to prosecute war like a warrior or like a lawyer?

He stayed up late Sunday night with aides at his home in Beacon Hill, rewriting - and rearguing

Sounds like a decisive guy all right.

"He attacks the material, he questions things, he tries to get it right," said Richard C. Holbrooke . . .. During a recent conversation about Iraq, he recounted, Mr. Kerry "interrupts me and he says, 'Have you read Peter Galbraith's article in The New York Review of Books? You've got to read that, it's very important.' "

That's supposed to impress the rubes, I guess. But we've had a technocrat as president before, in fact several, and they haven't been great shakes. Remember the last "policy wonk?"

This sounds like the sort of thing that journalists, lawyers and academics think makes a good leader, but it probably has the terrorists salivating.

And if he's so detail oriented and focused, how come he thinks it's Lambert Field in Green Bay? Watch for him to do the Lambert Leap if he wins. "Uncommonly bright, informed and curious" sounds ominously like how reporters describe Bill Clinton.

When Don Rumsfeld issues one of his "snowflakes" reporters treat it like proof that the administration has been lying to the American people. When Kerry does it, it's called "Socratic."

So will he be revising military strategy fifteen times a day and insisting on personally approving every bombing target? Scheduling the White House tennis court? Oops, "Aides were eager to attest that Mr. Kerry is not a micromanager." My bad.

Forever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth.

I wonder how much a treacly piece like this would be worth if they had hired a PR firm to place it? 15 points in the polls?