ONE of the more interesting things that John Kerry has done in 30 years in American politics is a stint as the No 2 to Michael Dukakis as Governor of Massachusetts.

Like much of the nonmilitary part of his CV, however, this period has been little mentioned in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Indeed, poor Mr Dukakis has been noticeable by his complete absence from this year’s contest, airbrushed out of Democratic history like an early Bolshevik in Stalin’s Russia.

The 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush is now universally acknowledged to have been among the most jaw-droppingly inept in modern political history — a byword for political amateurishness; America’s 1980s equivalent of Michael Foot. Mark Katz, a political humourist who began his career as speechwriter to Mr Dukakis, sums it up rather well: “My job was to write humour for the Dukakis campaign. So it still gives me a special pride when people refer to the campaign as one long joke.”

Though Mr Kerry accepted the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in Boston in July, Mr Dukakis, a former governor, former presidential candidate and old friend, was not allowed to speak.

Rumours that he had been found gagged and bound in a holding room beneath the Fleet Centre were not true. Instead, it turned out, he was cheerfully lecturing on political science to small audiences of undergraduates across the river in Cambridge.

Yet the name Dukakis is back in Democratic conversation because some in the party see signs that Kerry is going the way of his old boss 16 years ago.

The Kerry campaign, which set out to avoid the mistakes of the Dukakis campaign, is actually starting to look like an extended homage to it.

There are some unavoidable similarities. Both men are prominent Massachusetts politicians taking on flawed, incumbent Republicans called George Bush.

Kerry, like Dukakis, is insufferably wonkish. Mr Dukakis once admitted to having read a couple of volumes on Swedish land-use management while he was on holiday. Mr Kerry speaks to campaign audiences as though he were lecturing them on Swedish land-use management.

Both men claim (for Americans) suspiciously European antecedents — Mr Dukakis was a second-generation Greek immigrant and Mr Kerry’s family is half French.

Both had interesting and outspoken female relatives — Olympia Dukakis was a cousin who won an acting Oscar for her role in Moonstruck; Teresa Heinz Kerry is a ketchup billionaire who sometimes leaves friends and critics alike dumbstruck.

More troubling for the Democrats is that the current campaign dynamics suggest that the similarities may be even stronger.

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