Voters have to ask candidates if they can tell right from wrong

THE Rev James Dobson is endorsing a candidate for the White House for the first time. He says he had a dream.

"I woke up with sweaty palms. I dreamt that John Kerry was elected and that Hillary Clinton decided she'd never be president, so she agreed to accept Kerry's nomination and become Chief Justice of the United States. That was a nightmare."

This nightmare is motivating the Rev Dobson to work with George W Bush's election guru, Karl Rove. They hope to bring around five million American Evangelical Protestants to the polls. These are people who didn't turn up in 2000, partly because of last-minute revelations that Bush was once arrested for drink driving.

Bush is the more attractive choice for most religiously-motivated voters in the US. He's a born-again Christian, he supports faith-based charities when disbursing public funds, and he's more likely to appoint judges who are pro-life.

But it's not just about Bush.

The opportunism of John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, whenever ethical and religion issues arise, is a turn-off for the traditionally-minded voter.

Kerry has been trying to have it both ways. He has very publicly stressed his Catholicism and tried to placate pro-life voters by declaring that life begins at conception.

Yet he has a litmus test for judges he will appoint to the Supreme Court: they must all support abortion rights.

His running mate, John Edwards, seized on the death of actor and campaigner Christopher Reeve to make the case for controversial stem cell research using human embryos.

"If we do the work... that we will do when John Kerry is president," Edwards shamelessly proclaimed in Iowa, "people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

Edwards didn't seem to mind that no significant progress has been made with embryo stem cell research and that he could fairly be accused of raising false hopes among people with spinal injuries.

The Catholic Church doesn't endorse a candidate or political party, but some US bishops felt they had little option but to respond to this kind of campaigning. Writing in the New York Times last

Friday, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver considered the responsibilities of Catholic politicians over abortion.

"Faith without works is dead," Chaput wrote, deliberately choosing a quote Kerry used in the final presidential debate. "It is a valid point. People should act on what they claim to believe. Otherwise they are violating their own conscience, and lying to themselves and the rest of us."

Some left-wing American Catholics will be more displeased with Archbishop Chaput than with candidate Kerry. They claim abortion is just one issue, to be weighed up with the decision to go to war in Iraq, Bush's approach to tax cuts, healthcare and lots of other issues.

But the difference between abortion and these other issues in the eyes of Chaput and his fellow bishops is that Christians can never be ambivalent about abortion. All of the other questions allow for some legitimate disagreement. Whether Bush had just cause for going to war, or whether his economic policies help or hinder the poor are issues about which people of good conscience can argue back and forth.

Abortion is different.

In no other situation are people suggesting that it should be lawful to target and kill innocent human beings.

Yet Democrats feel it is they, and not the Republicans, who have the right to occupy the high moral ground.

"If every vote is allowed to be cast, and every vote is counted, John Kerry will be president," said Eric Holder of the Democrats' election task force. The implication being that those Republicans might try to steal the election again.

On this issue, however, it's not as clear who the good guys are.

THERE has been mischief on both sides. In 2000, Florida's Republicans certainly purged as many convicted criminals as they could from the electoral register. But in the same election, Democrats in Missouri were keeping polling stations open late in Democratic precincts, unlawfully maximising their vote. There were also irregularities in South Dakota, which may have cost the Republicans a Senate seat.

This time round, there have been reports of a firm in Nevada tearing up the registration forms of Democrats and Independents. But in Missouri, a Democrat support group is handing out fliers depicting a black person on the receiving end of a fire-hose blast.

"This is what they used to do to keep us from voting," it reads. On the back there's a list of recent allegations of voter intimidation, with the line, "This is how Republicans keep African-Americans from voting now."

"Never again," says John Kerry, "will a million African-Americans be denied their right to exercise the vote in the United States of America."

The Democrats' voter manual instructs party operatives to launch a "pre-emptive strike" by charging voter intimidation even if there is no evidence of any.

In fact, nobody has ever substantiated the allegations of voter intimidation in the 2000 election. John Fund, the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, appealed to the Democrats, the American Civil Liberties Union and others to provide real life examples of blacks, or anyone else, who was disenfranchised. But just as OJ Simpson never succeeded in his search for 'the real killers', nobody came up with the goods here either.

They don't need to. Fear-mongering is a long-established campaign tactic in American elections. Ask Michael Dukakis, who lost to George Bush Snr in 1988, partly because TV ads suggested he would free dangerous criminals.

This time around, both sides are vying to make the more effective use of fear. The Bush campaign shows gathering wolves to suggest that Kerry won't keep America safe. Kerry, meanwhile, is warning that Bush will revive the draft to bolster the war effort in Iraq. Although Bush stated flatly that he won't, Kerry insists that there is 'great potential' for conscription if his opponent wins.

Beneath the crude propaganda deployed by both sides in this campaign, however, there does lie a serious question of what constitutes good leadership in an age of crisis. Americans are evenly split on this.

Republicans admire straight-talking, moral strength, core values and decisive leadership. Democrats, on the other hand, prefer more deliberative leadership. They prefer someone who is knowledgeable, thoughtful, maybe even uncertain someone who sees the complexities in life.

In Western Europe, we are likely to prefer the second set of characteristics to the first. We have been taught to be sceptical of straightforward answers to life's hard questions.

But that approach is not always correct. America withdrew its forces from Somalia and allowed a genocide in Rwanda partly because Bill Clinton was not resolute in a crisis.

And for Rev James Dobson and others, George W Bush's ability to say "abortion is wrong" makes him about as presidential as Abraham Lincoln, who said something similar about slavery.