John Kerry is blowing this election with a campaign that is internally dysfunctional, incoherent on Iraq, and not nearly tough – or quick – enough in responding to attacks and mistakes by his opponent.

People who work in the Kerry campaign have described it as like New York City’s Board of Education 15 years ago.

Decisions don’t get made. The buck gets passed. Choices get blurred. Phone calls don’t get returned. Smart thinkers don’t get allowed into the campaign by the burnt-out palace guard.

The campaign’s senior strategists are shell-shocked by their recent mistakes. They are afraid to make bold, clear decisions, or to go on the robust attack.

One Kerry insider told me the campaign, in its current phase, is like the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

“We are shooting in the air like Hamilton, and they are aiming for our heart like Burr,” he said.

Top campaign strategist Bob Shrum advised the candidate not to attack President Bush and to sit on his lead. Only there was no lead to sit on.

Mr. Shrum is a brilliant, poetic speechwriter, but he is no match for Karl Rove in a knife fight, which is what presidential politics has become.

There are still 49 days left and anything can happen. It is far from over. There will be three nationally televised debates. The situation on the ground seems to be deteriorating in Iraq. The jobs famine is not improving in the outsourced rust belt.

Investigative reporters are vigorously digging into scandals in the Bush past. Kitty Kelly’s book on the Bush family is about to be published.

We are only in the sixth inning. But as of today, Mr. Kerry’s biggest weakness is his campaign team.

The Kerry campaign is addicted to the science of polling and focus groups hooked up to meters and dials.

But the meters cannot tell you what working men are really thinking in a saloon in Toledo, or what a single mom is feeling in Pittsburgh.

The Democratic convention turned out to be a wasted opportunity because the meters told them not to be negative, to only be upbeat and optimistic, not to attack Mr. Bush, not to mention Bin Laden, and to stress Vietnam, which is the past.

When I asked my friend Jimmy Breslin what he thought was wrong with the Kerry campaign, he replied, “Too many words. He was in the Senate too long. When he sees a comma, he really gets going with words that say nothing. The campaign has an attitude of fog.”

Mr. Kerry was wise to choose John Edwards as his running mate, but the campaign has allowed Mr. Edwards to become invisible.

Compared to Lee Atwater, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove, the people running the Kerry campaign do not know how to be tough, or throw a straight right hand, the way the Kennedys did.

They saw what the Bush operatives did to Michael Dukakis with Willie Horton in 1998. They saw the gutter savagery used against John McCain in 2000, and the knifing of triple Vietnam amputee Max Cleland in 2002, who was labeled as unpatriotic in a smear campaign run by Ralph Reed in Georgia.

Yet, it took Mr. Kerry two weeks to respond to the accusations made against him in the Swift boat ads. Maybe the addition of James Carville and Howard Wolfson will help, but the problem seems to be the campaign’s impenetrable decision-making structure.

As I wrote last week, Ralph Reed has finally admitted getting $4 million from Indian gambling casinos, laundered through a public relations company. Mr. Reed is supposed to be a sworn enemy of gambling as the founder of the Christian Coalition, but he took this blood money and now he is running the Bush-Cheney campaign in five Southern states, including Florida.

Mr. Kerry has not attacked him for this hypocrisy. The Senate’s Indian Affairs committee will have a hearing on the fleecing of Indian tribes by power brokers on September 29, but the two Democrats on the committee – Harry Reid of Nevada and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota – have not asked Senator McCain to subpoena Mr. Reed to testify.

Sources close to Mr. Reid – the no. 2 Senate Democrat – say the senator asked the Kerry campaign for the approval to subpoena Mr. Reed three weeks ago, but never got an answer. Time is running short. If Ralph Reed were exposed at a Senate hearing before TV cameras, it would blow the minds of anti-gambling Christian evangelical voters – and make him radioactive within the Bush campaign.

Boxing monopolist, swindler of champions, and convicted killer Don King has been raising money for Mr. Bush. He was all over the GOP convention, and has been on Air Force One with the president.

But the Kerry campaign has never even made an issue of the fact that Mr. Bush is so desperate for the support of high-profile blacks he will even cavort around with Mr. King

Don King has gone from Manslaughter One to Air Force One.

On Iraq, Mr. Kerry’s policy is incomprehensible. He voted against the first Gulf War. He voted for the Iraq War. He voted against funding the Iraq war with $87 billion – and now he says he would have still voted for the war even if he knew there were no WMDS, and no linkage between Saddam Hussein and the mass murder of 9/11.

Mr. Kerry’s remarks about what to do about the outsourcing jobs make little sense. He should campaign for a week with Robert Rubin, and finally develop an accessible program about jobs and the crushing Bush deficit. He should handcuff himself to Mr. Rubin, who gave us a strong economy, jobs, a budget surplus, and a rising stock market.

I want Mr. Kerry to win. But unless he radically changes his campaign and his message, he won’t.