Dick Morris made a good point on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News last night. He said the next two months were crucial for John Kerry's campaign, as it's the period when he can define himself to voters who may know his name but nothing about him.

How that happens depends on whether the national campaign, which has all but formally begun, slides into sleaze at the expense of a fair exploration of the candidates' records, background and character.

At the same time, says Morris, the Bush team knows that if the country remains as closely divided as it seems to be, Bush can't win on his positives alone. He needs to define Kerry on his terms.

Hence, we're seeing the White House stepping up its efforts to defuse the air national guard story - or at least divert attention from it - as it threatens to drown out everything else for now.

Bush's defenders, and those who believe the war was justified, are bound to question the relevance of the circumstances surrounding the president's war service, but as Todd Gitlin writes:

...now that the White House has been exposed for ample deception vis-a-vis Saddam Hussein?s hypothetical weapons, Bush?s tricky, evasive, sometimes flatly wrong statements about his dubious time in the elite Air National Guard in 1972-73 could be cast as prefigurations of a pattern of unreliability ...

History suggests that if the contest gets tighter as it plays out, we can probably expect things to get nastier...

Meanwhile, Gen Wesley Clark is set to endorse Kerry today.