Dear John Kerry:

We see people's faith in your prospects of being elected declining alarmingly as a result of the uninspiring nature of your campaign so far. Election Day is now seven weeks off. We offer you the following talking points as a way of making this contest more relevant to the real concerns of the American people. You could even win with them.

1. Let's talk about Vietnam for a minute and then put it out of the way once and for all, since what we really need to discuss are the very real, painful issues confronting Americans today.

First, you were in Vietnam and you were wounded there. You certainly didn't get hurt as badly as some other people did, but you were there and you were under enemy fire. George W. Bush, a pilot for the National Guard at the same time, stayed nice and safe and comfortable in Texas, Alabama and Harvard, thanks to his daddy's connections and money. Period.

2. The Iraq war. You voted for it when Congress approved it because you, like almost everyone else, didn't believe the president would lie to us or get the intelligence behind his case for the war wrong. You, like the rest of us, know now that that was wrong.

Where we are now is that George Bush is getting our soldiers killed -- a thousand so far -- in pursuit of a war to make himself a war president, a president whom the rest of us are supposed to support and give another term. Yet this is a war that he got us into, with unclear objectives, a war he doesn't know how to get us out of.

He is also spending way too much of the public's money -- at least $200 billion so far -- in pursuit of his war, putting money into the pockets of Halliburton and other companies that finance his political campaign. Yet you know what we need that money for -- to fund Medicare, to preserve Social Security, to repair our roads and bridges, to put enough teachers in our schools so that Mr. Bush's claim of "no child left behind" will not be just a cruel joke.

3. The economy. Speaking of Halliburton, do you think it is any accident that company after company has turned out to be a sewer of crookedness while George Bush and his business friends have been in the White House? Let's start with Enron and his friend, "Kenny Boy" Lay, who looted that company.

Now, you don't like taxes either, but George Bush cut taxes for the rich. There was a small refund check for regular folks at the same time. That check is long gone, while the cuts in the taxes of the rich will go on forever. In the meantime, interest rates go up and mortgages and car payments and credit card bills are crushing many Americans, even with all adults in a household working.

Those interest rates go up because George Bush has the government competing against other borrowers for the money in the economy, because he is spending cash the government doesn't have. The government is going into the hole by more than a billion dollars a day, because of the budget deficits that President Bush and the Republicans who control the House and the Senate have run up with their spending on the war and their tax cuts for the rich.

4. So go ahead. Give George Bush and Dick Cheney four more years in the White House. Let the Republicans control the Congress for another term. Let the president and his Republicans keep sacrificing our soldiers in a war the United States is paying for on credit, one it doesn't need to be fighting at all.

You, Sen. Kerry, and your running mate, John Edwards, will still be here. You will still be trying to tell America what needs to be done to turn itself around, to put itself back on the right track, a track where it is spending its money on the right things and not stirring up the world's hatred for the United States.

But the voters need you to make your case now, in the strongest possible terms, to let them see what the real choices are. Nov. 3, the day after the elections, will be too late. Tell the truth without pulling your punches.