One thing is clear at this critical juncture in the presidential race: The Democrats have grabbed hold of the national security issue and are going to fight the Bush-Cheney team over it with bare-knuckled fervor until Election Day.

John Beale, Post-Gazette Supporter Rainah Ruckert of Oakland poses with vice presidential candidate John Edwards at a town meeting at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday. Click photo for larger image. More on the debates View an interactive report from AP on the upcoming Presidential debates. See comprehensive information on Campaign 2004 nuts and bolts ... battleground states, candidates, voting equipment, first ladies and third parties.

Within the very first minutes of his campaign stop at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, lashed out against "fear mongering" by Republicans including Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney said three weeks ago that if voters make the "wrong choice" in the 2004 election, there's a danger that America "will get hit again" by terrorists in a devastating way.

Edwards also struck back against an ad that began airing last weekend in Iowa and Wisconsin attacking his running mate, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry. The ad, produced by an outside Republican group known as Progress for America Voter Fund, shows images of al-Qaida terror network chief Osama bin Laden, 9/11 terror attacks ringleader Mohamed Atta and the World Trade Center towers, then asks: "Would you trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers?"

"For them to exploit one of the great tragedies in American history for personal gain is wrong," Edwards said yesterday. "When they engage in these cheap political tricks, John and I are actually focused on making sure we are ready -- that when John becomes president, we do everything that has to be done to keep this country safe."

While Kerry is preparing for his first debate against President Bush tomorrow night, Edwards is serving as the campaign's main message bearer. He has picked up where Kerry left off last week, focusing on what is widely seen as Kerry's most difficult hurdle in the 2004 race: overcoming the perception that Bush would do a better job of protecting the country against terrorism.

In a town hall meeting that packed CMU's Wiegand Gymnasium, the man who spent most of the last year talking in warm, empathetic tones about how his experience as the son of a mill worker had helped him understand and fight for worker's jobs and health care benefits, yesterday delivered a far sharper message. Focusing almost exclusively on national security in his opening speech, he promised that a Kerry-Edwards administration would find terrorists and "crush them."

Edwards also zeroed in on what is almost certain to be Kerry's central argument in tomorrow's debate in Coral Gables, Fla.: that Bush's focus on the invasion of Iraq led him to neglect threats from al-Qaida and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan as well as growing nuclear perils in North Korea and Iran.

"You don't hear much about Osama bin Laden anymore, do you? Not from this administration," Edwards said. "We will not take our eyes off the people who perpetrated the attacks of Sept. 11th; we will make sure we go after these people relentlessly."

Edwards also repeatedly linked the spiraling cost of the Iraq war with the lack of resources to expand domestic programs, including the number of emergency workers and police on U.S. streets, even as he questioned the administration's truthfulness about Iraq.

"They told us they had a plan; not true," said Edwards, who was among senators who voted to authorize the president's use of force in Iraq in 2002. "They told us they had enough troops that they'd be able to secure the country and secure it quickly; not true. They told us this war was going to pay for itself," he said, producing chuckles from his audience.

"Two hundred billion and counting," Edwards said. "That's compared to the total of $5 billion that was spent on the first [Persian Gulf] war. Why? Because this president's father actually did the work to build a coalition; America was not trying to do this alone."

Helping to drive home the Kerry line at CMU was Kristen Breitweiser, of Middletown Township, N.J., a woman widowed by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. She said she voted for Bush in 2000 but endorsed Kerry after watching what she regarded as the Republican convention's exploitation of the domestic terror threat.

Breitweiser was one of a group of 9/11 widows who had lobbied for creation of the nonpartisan commission that studied the attacks and subsequently pressed for their access to Bush administration officials' testimony and documents. Yesterday, she described their work as a long and frustrating struggle with the Bush administration, which initially opposed the commission's recommendations and was resistant to allowing testimony by its officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"We wanted to learn from the mistakes and the failures," Breitweiser said. "What we received back was nothing but a battle."

She said she had listened to the GOP convention speeches and felt that the allusions linking Sept. 11 with Iraq were wrong. "One of the things the 9/11 commission report found in its hearings was that there was no connection to Iraq," Breitweiser said. "If President Bush had started an investigation in the days after 9/11 ... we might not have gone to Iraq.

"I have a 5-year-old little girl who lost her dad to al-Qaida," she said. "I don't want to lose her one day because she's working in a city or on mass transportation and she gets blown up as payback for Iraq."

Two polls released this week show that the Kerry campaign has regained some ground lost to Bush in Pennsylvania -- one from the Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and the other a joint poll by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Temple University in Philadelphia.

In the Quinnipiac survey, Kerry led Bush 49 percent to 46 percent among 726 likely voters surveyed Sept. 22- 26. That was essentially within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

The Temple-Inquirer poll found that Kerry led Bush 49 to 47 percent. Asked what issue was most important factor in their vote this year, 38 percent of respondents chose either terrorism or the war in Iraq; 31 percent said the key issue was jobs or the economy. That poll, based on interviews with 1,133 likely voters statewide and conducted between Sept. 16 to 23, has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.