By Bob Morgan, Jr. By Bob Morgan, Jr.

The strange saga last week of the hotly disputed CBS memos relating to President Bush’s National Guard service should tell John Kerry and his advisers that the time has come to move the focus of the campaign.

Mr. Kerry and his allies began last week by attempting to reopen the much-examined saga of Mr. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. In particular, they cited CBS News documents that seemed to substantiate an allegation that Mr. Bush refused a direct order to get a physical exam in 1972. Unfortunately for the President’s foes, however, serious questions arose about the authenticity of the documents. A number of seemingly credible independent experts asserted that the documents were quite possibly fakes printed on modern word processing machines rather than on 1970s typewriters. Dan Rather and CBS News have stoutly maintained that the documents are real, but the focus of the campaign was turned for a number of days on the minutiae of typewriter technology.

The flap over the documents should be wakeup call to Senator Kerry and his Democratic allies to switch the focus of their campaign rapidly. Beyond generally honoring John Kerry’s service in battle, relatively few voters are interested in Vietnam era events, particularly those involving President Bush. Mr. Bush is not claiming that anyone should vote for him on the basis of his great record in the Texas Guard and indeed his campaign more or less concedes that his life prior to the mid 1980s was something of a washout. Rather, Mr. Bush is asking voters to look to his character as they have seen it in the White House over the last four years. Thus, even if the memoranda purporting to show that the future president ignored an order 32 years ago were indisputably genuine, it would probably sway few people.

Where Mr. Kerry needs to turn his attention urgently is national security in 2004. His essential problem as a candidate is that a significant number of voters have disqualified him, at least for now, as a potential commander in chief. Regardless of their dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration or the general direction of the country, they do not believe that Mr. Kerry will do enough to protect the country from terrorism and foreign enemies.

Mr. Kerry has set the stage for this loss of confidence in two ways. First, in his convention in Boston, Mr. Kerry harped on his Vietnam service, ignored his role as a leading national protester of the war and, much more tellingly, made no effort to explain his many votes and positions as Senator and Senate candidate seemingly hostile to United States military actions, weapons systems and foreign intelligence. Not surprisingly, this Senate record was the subject of a withering attack by Zell Miller and others at the Republican convention.

Second, Mr. Kerry’s statements on Iraq have been maddeningly opaque. He voted for the war, then described himself as an “antiwar” candidate, then voted against the $87 billion for funding the war (after famously initially voting for it), then announced in August that he would have voted for the war even if he knew that weapons of mass destruction would not be found and then described Iraq in September as the wrong war at the wrong time.

This is obviously unsatisfactory. Until Mr. Kerry talks more plainly about Iraq and national defense he is not going to climb back into the race, no matter what Mr. Bush may or may not have done back in 1972.