Harold Meyerson, editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, tells a story of a friend of his who had a dream. He was walking through the headquarters of the Kerry campaign. Behind a door marked “Campaign Manager” he found Kerry manager Mary Beth Cahill. As he drew nearer, however, the woman suddenly ripped off her Cahill mask, behind which was… Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’s campaign manager. Mr. Meyerson’s friend woke up screaming.

Lots of Democrats are having similar nightmares about 1988, when Mr. Dukakis, once ahead 17 points in the polls, lost by eight to George W. Bush’s father.

Says one Democratic consultant: “I would have called you crazy if in 1989 you would have told me that a decade and a half later this party was going to nominate Dukakis’s lieutenant governor – another aloof Massachusetts liberal who would overconfidently feel he would mop the floor with this clueless guy named Bush. But I fear I’ve seen this movie, and it’s ‘Groundhog Day.'”

Like Mr. Kerry, Mr. Dukakis was a liberal at heart, but both were perceived as moderates until the fall campaign. Reporters, most of whom supported both Democrats, did all that they could to prop up that image. The need to preserve a moderate image prompted both candidates to talk evasively about issues; in his convention speech Mr. Dukakis famously declared: “This election is not about ideology, it’s about competence.”

“That strategy ran into trouble when their opponents adopted the simple expedient of pointing out their liberalism using ads with specific, undisputable examples,” concludes a study by Indiana University’s Erik Rasmusen. “At that point, their advantage in the polls started evaporating.”

Liberal journalists have started to pile on the Kerry campaign. “Kerry is Dukakis, after all,” sighs Joe Klein of Time magazine. “Deadly dull, slow to respond, trapped in Democratic banality; he actually said he was for ‘good jobs at good wages.'”

Craig Crawford, now with Congressional Quarterly and MSNBC, spent 1988 covering the Dukakis campaign. “Do I see parallels? I see only parallels.” He notes that many of the same players he knew are back: Bob Shrum, a key adviser to Mr. Dukakis, is now Mr. Kerry’s top strategist. A top Dukakis deputy, Tad Devine, is Mr. Shrum’s deputy in the Kerry campaign. John Sasso, Mr. Dukakis’s chief of staff, is Mr. Kerry’s top aide on his campaign plane. Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary, got his start on the Dukakis press operation.

Mr. Crawford agrees that Mr. Kerry has shown the ability to come back from behind, as he did against Howard Dean this year and when he defeated the popular Governor Weld in 1996. “But Kerry has only run against Massachusetts Republicans, and the national kind are tougher and more conservative than he’s used to,” he points out. “I think he’s a little shell shocked.”

The election is not over, and foreign events or the debates could change the polls dramatically. But it’s not too early to ask how Democrats wound up making many of the same mistakes that crippled the Dukakis effort. Leading Democrats agree on many of the problems plaguing the Kerry campaign:

* Bad campaign visuals. “I smell the same New England genius that I smelled in the Dukakis campaign in 1988,” Gerald Austin, an Ohio political consultant, told the New York Times. “Where do they put him for photo opportunities? Snowboarding in Sun Valley, shooting skeet in the Ohio Valley, and windsurfing off that great working-class vacation paradise, Nantucket.”

Others blame a chaotic staff structure with too many decision-makers and an indecisive candidate. Mr. Kerry is addicted to telephone conference calls in which he will sample the views of several aides, seem to come to a decision and then reverse or modify it after one-on-one conversations with others.

* Buying into a myth that Mr. Kerry couldn’t be labeled another Massachusetts liberal. “He’s a guy who actually shot communists and, when he was a district attorney, locked up murderers,” says Rep. Barney Frank. But Mr. Kerry has a 20-year Senate record, one that at times has put him to the left of Senator Kennedy. Mr. Kerry doesn’t like to talk about his Senate record, but that doesn’t mean Republicans will ignore it.

* Losing control of the message. “If pitching is 75% of baseball, then 75% of election victory revolves around the definition of the campaign,” Patrick Caddell, the pollster for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 and 1980 campaigns, once wrote. “He who sets the definition of the campaign usually wins.”

Mr. Devine has admitted that the Dukakis campaign failed to “run a general election in broad thematic terms that are cultural and historical. But you get so wrapped up in what you’re doing, sometimes you lose a lot of focus.”

That is also what appears to have happened to Mr. Kerry. In August 1988, Mr. Dukakis repaired to the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires and failed to respond to attacks on his prison furlough program, centered on the murderer Willie Horton, who had raped and brutalized a Maryland couple while out on weekend release. This year, Mr. Kerry hung out in Nantucket and allowed himself to be filmed windsurfing while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pounded him for nearly a month with little effective rebuttal. “The Bush people have a very effective message: The president is tough on terror and John Kerry is either too liberal or too indecisive to do the job. That’s become the campaign backdrop,” says GOP consultant Charles Black.

Now some Democrats are overreacting in panic to Mr. Kerry’s drop in the polls. Ms. Estrich, now a columnist and newspaper columnist, says the lesson of the Dukakis campaign she ran was that “the trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we’re not mean enough.” She laid out the alternative strategy: a “long and ugly road” to November.” She suggested it was time to dig for Bush scandals, from his Air National Guard service (already done) to his prior drinking. “As Larry Flynt discovered, a million dollars loosens lips. Are there others to be loosened?”

As a desperation move, such talk no doubt has its appeal. In 1988, Donna Brazile, then an aide on the Dukakis campaign, lost her job after she openly accused George H.W. Bush of having an extramarital affair. The incident hurt Mr. Dukakis. This year similar tactics are unlikely to work. President Bush has a four-year record in office that can be judged for good or for ill. He is not a stranger to the American people, and his faults are not unknown.

Even if Democrats have nothing to do with kamikaze attacks on Mr. Bush, they could still be hurt by them. Mr. Caddell says that if the documents CBS News used to claim Mr. Bush shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard are proved to be forgeries, “it would be the end of the race.” He explained to Fox News that Democrats “have gotten themselves so involved in this issue that if they’re not authentic, they’re going to be blamed for it. It’s incredible to me that they’ve gotten in this. I’m trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth.”

No doubt few Democrats will agree, but Mr. Caddell’s larger point – that the Democratic Party will have some soul-searching to do should Mr. Kerry lose – is clearly valid. A party that is so myopic as to repeat so many of the mistakes it made in a historic loss only a decade and a half ago is a party that needs to re-examine its relationship with the American people. Perhaps, following the lead of Britain’s Labor Party, it needs to shrug off its most liberal elements and embrace truly centrist positions.

If they lose this November, Democrats may console themselves that a strong personality such as Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards will rescue them in 2008. But they would be wise to conduct a far more thorough autopsy. After Mr. Dukakis’s loss, the party turned to Bill Clinton in 1992,who campaigned as a “new Democrat” and won back the White House. But even running as a centrist, Mr. Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote. To win elections, especially in wartime, Democrats may actually have to change their spots.

To subscribe to the “Political Diary” e-mail newsletter featuring Mr. Fund, visit www.OpinionJournal.com, from which this column is excerpted. ©Dow Jones & Company Inc.