John Kerry mentioned Vietnam only in passing when he came to town last week, saying that he had defended this country as a young man and would do so as president. He focused instead on more recent history -- the record of George W. Bush -- and on what a Kerry presidency would hold for the future. It came across as a serious speech by a serious man, a major course correction after last month's disastrous detour into his martial past.

With John Edwards on the ticket, the Kerry campaign is hoping that North Carolina is in play. That's why the candidate has been here three times in the last two months. But in this polarized and emotional race, it's going to take a lot more than selecting our senator as his running mate for Kerry to carry the state. Bush still leads in the polls, and Mike Munger, chair of the political science department at Duke, says that GOP presidential candidates tend to do better here than polls predict they will.

The friendly crowd at the beautifully restored Southern Railway station in downtown Greensboro responded with increasing fervor after Kerry worked through the predictable politician-comes-South jokes (grits, learning to say y'all) to touch on jobs, health care, education, the environment and national security. He brought down the house by introducing himself as John Edwards' running mate. But all that was preaching to the choir.

The real audience remains the undecided voter. Again and again, Kerry reached out to North Carolinians on issues that he tried to strip of red or blue packaging. Take away the partisan labels, he said, and judge the facts. He called his platform "common sense" and pitched his positions as "values" that cut across party lines.

Kerry's warm-up act, 13th District Congressman Brad Miller, enumerated some of the reasons why North Carolina should consider going Democratic for the first time since Jimmy Carter won back in 1976. And the numbers across this state are not pretty: 160,000 lost manufacturing jobs in the Bush era, a nearly 10 percent dip in median income, more people poor and uninsured.

But on this day at least, Miller was a lonely voice for Kerry among ranking North Carolina Democrats. The big guns stayed away in droves. Among the no-shows: Gov. Mike Easley, Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, U.S. Senate candidate Erskine Bowles, and 12th District Congressman Mel Watt. The Kerry campaign clearly thinks Bush can be made to work for our 15 electoral votes, but so far at least the Massachusetts senator is not getting a lot of help around here from his own team.

Kerry went right at Bush on domestic issues, declaring that "W" stands for "Wrong" on health care (he called it "a right, not a privilege for the wealthy and connected"), veterans affairs and exporting jobs. He invoked the names of North Carolina's own Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt when discussing education. Sometimes he got specific, citing the ban on bulk purchasing of pharmaceuticals by Medicare in Bush's expensive new entitlement package, and sometimes he settled for pleasing generalities.

Looming over everything was the issue of security. Bush's virtue is that he has been decisive and aggressive in a confusing and frightening time. People rally to the president during a war -- that's pretty much the reason Bush isn't already packing for Crawford -- and even continuing bad news from Iraq may not hurt the incumbent, at least not in time to do Kerry much good.

This is dangerous territory for Kerry. It doesn't seem to matter to many voters that the bad guys are back in much of Afghanistan and that forces hostile to our interests still control a sizable swath of Iraq, which of course had nothing to do with the events of three years ago yesterday in the first place. Bush is taking the fight to, well, someone, and that seems to carry a lot of weight.

Kerry's ultimate success, in North Carolina and beyond, may depend on his ability to uncouple the war in Iraq from the war on terror, and to demonstrate the gap between Bush's goals for Iraq and the current situation there. In Greensboro, Kerry pounded Bush for his "catastrophic choice" to go into Iraq without a plan for the peace. He promised to rebuild our "shredded alliances" and said he would try to bring home our troops within four years, while warning against leaving a power vacuum in the region. And he said he would use force to defend the United States, including taking "proactive" measures, whatever that may mean.

It was a start but did not seem to me enough to move any great number of undecideds into his camp. Kerry has less than two months to make his case that Bush's decisions in Iraq have been bad ones and, more importantly, that his own decisions would improve the situation there while advancing the overall war against the people and organizations that would do us harm.

On domestic issues, Kerry presented a compelling set of arguments to North Carolina voters. In any other year, that might have been enough to push the state into the Democratic column. But with seven weeks to go, his message on security still seems a bit fuzzy. Unless he can sharpen it in a hurry, I would expect the GOP to continue its generation-long hold on North Carolina's electoral votes.