The belated discovery that George W. Bush’s campaign applied two disparate standards for counting overseas ballots in Florida – liberal for Bush strongholds and stringent for counties carried by Al Gore – underscores again the huge advantage that the well-funded conservative news media gives to the Republicans.

By having a powerful media of its own – from TV networks to nationwide talk radio, from news magazines to daily newspapers – the conservative movement can give its stamp to events during the crucial few days when the public is paying attention. By the time, the truth comes out – if it does – it's often too late to change the outcome.

Now, eight months after the razor-thin Florida vote – and nearly six months into Bush’s presidency – The New York Times reveals that a key moment of Election 2000 came when the Bush campaign labeled Gore unpatriotic for insisting that Florida's law be followed in counting overseas absentee votes, including those from military personnel.

Immediately, the Gore-as-unpatriotic charge was picked up by the conservative press and echoed on the TV talk shows. The mainstream press joined the stampede.

Gore also faced accusations of hypocrisy for seeking hand recounts for ballots kicked out by vote-counting machines while urging that legal requirements be met for overseas ballots. Sen. Joe Lieberman, Gore’s running mate, was verbally bludgeoned on NBC’s "Meet the Press" until he agreed that the overseas military votes should be given the "benefit of the doubt."

The Bush strategy opened the door for Republicans to press for lax standards on overseas votes in pro-Bush counties while enforcing narrow rules for pro-Gore counties, a six-month New York Times investigation found. The result was that about 680 questionable ballots were counted that would have been rejected under the terms of Florida’s election statute.

Those overseas ballots lacked required postmarks, were postmarked after Election Day, were mailed inside the United States, were cast by voters who had already voted, were missing signatures or contained other irregularities. Meanwhile, hundreds of ballots with similar flaws in pro-Gore counties were thrown away.

It could not be determined exactly how many votes Bush gained from the disparate standards used to count flawed ballots. But the Times reported that a statistical analysis of the 680 questionable ballots indicated that Bush probably netted about 292 votes, meaning that his official victory margin of 537 votes would have been trimmed to 245 votes if those ballots had not been counted. [NYT, July 15, 2001]

Adding the Tallies

That finding – combined with newspaper analyses of Florida ballots that were kicked out by voting machines but that indicated a presidential choice – means that Gore most likely would have won the state and thus the presidency if a statewide recount had been conducted and the flawed overseas ballots had been excluded.

The Miami Herald and USA Today reported that Gore registered a net gain of 682 if so-called "overvotes" had been checked by hand. That number alone would be more than enough to erase Bush's 537-vote margin, but the newspapers made other adjustments to the tally as they incorporated uncounted ballots that showed intent of the voters.

The newspapers concluded that Gore would have won by 242 if ballots with multiple indentations -- indicating a malfunctioning machine -- were counted. Gore's margin would have swelled to 332 if ballots with indentations only for president were counted. If all indented ballots were thrown out, however, Bush would have won by margins of 407 or 152, depending on whether ballots with hanging chads or only fully punched through chads were counted, the newspapers reported.

The New York Times' finding suggests that if the faulty overseas votes were disqualified -- trimming Bush's lead to 245 votes -- Gore would have won under three of the four standards for counting ballots.

Additionally, USA Today reported that Gore lost about 15,000 to 25,000 votes from ballot errors that resulted from confusing ballot designs in some counties.

In another move that cut into Gore’s tally, Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration improperly purged hundreds of voters – predominately African-American – after falsely identifying them as felons. According to exit polls, Gore carried the African-American vote by a 9-to-1 margin, so the phony felon purge predictably hit him hardest.

Now, with The New York Times’ findings, it is even clearer that Gore was the choice of Florida voters as well as the U.S. electorate which favored him by more than a half million ballots. Nevertheless, the American people ended up with George W. Bush in the White House.

Media Edge

The will of the American voters was overturned in large part because the Bush campaign and its conservative media allies succeeded in portraying Gore as the interloper and Bush as the rightful claimant of the presidency.

From Election Night on, the conservative news media and much of the mainstream national press granted Bush a sense of entitlement. This pro-Bush tilt was a carryover from the campaign where the national news media’s distaste for Bill Clinton’s vice president was a key factor in helping Bush overcome a public impression that he lacked the qualifications to be president.

Often relying on false Gore quotes or applying hostile interpretations to his remarks, the news media neutralized many of the doubts about Bush by portraying Gore as dishonest or delusional. By contrast, deceptive remarks by Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney, were given a virtual pass by the both conservative and mainstream news media. [See "Protecting Bush-Cheney" at Consortiumnews.com]

During the Florida recount battle, the pattern continued. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other conservative news outlets treated the certification of Bush’s victory by Secretary of State Katherine Harris as decisive. They also portrayed Gore as a "sore loserman" and were quick to promote other Republican "themes" such as the attack on Gore’s initial insistence on applying state law to overseas votes.

Mainstream news outlets sometimes struggled for a more neutral position, though the competitive pressures caused them to jump on many of the bandwagons set in motion by the conservative outlets. There was no countervailing media organization investigating and highlighting misdeeds by the Bush campaign.

So, for instance, relatively little attention was given to the Bush campaign’s financing of hooligans who were dispatched from the Republican congressional offices to Florida to organize rowdy demonstrations, including a riot outside the offices of the Miami-Dade canvassing board as it was trying to start a hand recount of votes on Nov. 22.

In the months since the election, the Bush campaign has refused to release information about how it spent roughly $8 million on the recount battle. Though that data could be vital to understanding how the Bush campaign pursued its hardball political strategies, there has been no clamor from the national news media for this information.

The spending data also might shed light on one of startling disclosures in the new Times story. The newspaper reported that Secretary of State Harris, a co-chairman of the Bush campaign, allowed "veteran Republican political consultants" to set up a "war room" in her offices from which they "helped shape the post-election instructions (from Harris) to county canvassing boards." Among those instructions were the requirements for counting overseas ballots.

During the key days of last November, however, conservative media outlets and much of the mainstream press portrayed Harris as the victim of a Democratic smear campaign when the Gore campaign challenged the objectivity of her decisions.

New Reality

Beyond the 2000 Election, this conservative media tilt has become a dominant reality in modern U.S. politics.

The imbalance also was not an accident. It resulted from a conscious, expensive and well-conceived plan by conservatives to build what amounts to a rapid-response media machine. This machine closely coordinates with Republican leaders and can strongly influence – if not dictate – what is considered news.

There is no countervailing media on the left-of-center side, except for are a handful of small-circulation leftist journals whose writers often join with conservatives in attacking Democrats though for different reasons.

The only major media force, outside the conservative fold, is the mainstream media – sometimes called the corporate media since it is owned by huge companies such as AOL Time-Warner, General Electric or Viacom. This media operates with the goal of maximizing profits and thus seeks to avoid alienating well-heeled consumers among its diverse viewers.

Since the conservative media aggressively pushes its information into play, however, the mainstream media often feels obliged to match the conservative-oriented news rather than lose out competitively or be seen as holding an anti-conservative bias.

This dynamic has been apparent for years, though little commented upon. It began to emerge during the Reagan-Bush administration as the conservative media grew and mainstream journalists found themselves attacked by the right as alleged "liberals." To protect their careers within corporations that were generally favorable to the Republican administration, mainstream journalists shifted their reporting to the right as a way to prove they weren’t "liberal."

That tendency increased during the Clinton administration as the right-wing press and the mainstream press teamed up to promote "scandals" such as the Travel Office firings and the Clintons’ Whitewater real-estate investment. Stories of such minimal importance would have been one-day events, if reported at all, during the Reagan-Bush years. But the conservative media whipped these stories along and mainstream reporters followed so they wouldn't be tagged as Clinton apologists.

The Thomas/Hill Factor

From 1993 to 2000, the conservative media also mounted well-funded investigations of the Clintons’ personal lives, a strategy driven in part by a chip-on-the-shoulder conviction that the liberals had done the same in falsely accusing Republican Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of a bizarre pattern of sexual harassment toward female subordinates, including boasts about pornographic movies he had watched.

Thomas had angrily denied the charges and conservative journalist David Brock had discredited Thomas’ principal accuser, Anita Hill, as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" in an article that ran in the American Spectator.

Now, a decade later, Brock has recanted his attacks on Hill and his defense of Thomas. In his upcoming book Blinded by the Right [excerpted in Talk magazine, August 2001], Brock described how he was recruited and paid by right-wing forces to destroy Hill.

"I saw my introduction to right-wing checkbook journalism as a big break," Brock wrote. "I set out to rehabilitate Thomas and clear his name for the history books by exposing the treachery of his liberal detractors; in framing the article I would play to the deeply ingrained conservative suspicion that the ‘liberal media’ had hidden the real story behind Hill’s case."

This myth of the "liberal media" dates back even further to the 1970s when conservative activists blamed the press for losing the Vietnam War and hounding an innocent President Richard Nixon from office over the Watergate scandal.

These beliefs have remained conservative doctrine in the quarter century since, even though the U.S. military has conceded that the Vietnam War was lost by poor strategy and high casualties, not from disloyal reporting. [For details, see The Military and the Media: The U.S. Army in Vietnam by Pentagon historian William M. Hammond.]

The conservative certainty about the media’s unfairness to Nixon also has held firm despite the release of hundreds of hours of incriminating White House tapes.

Nevertheless, conservative activists felt that this perceived enemy – this "liberal media" – justified their creation of a separate right-wing media and their attacks on mainstream reporters who dug up information unfavorable to the conservative cause. "We needed our own media, our own reporters, and our own means of getting out our side of the story," Brock wrote.

Activist Judges

Beyond admitting now that he unfairly maligned Hill to protect Thomas, Brock adds stunning details about how the smear campaign collaborated with leading conservatives, including key judges on the federal courts.

One of those judges was U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, who was one of two judges who overturned Oliver North’s Iran-contra felony convictions in 1990.

"Though the confirmation battle had been won, Thomas’s closest friends knew that a full-scale defense of Thomas would help confer legitimacy on his Supreme Court tenure," Brock wrote. George H.W. Bush's White House passed along some psychiatric opinion that Anita Hill suffered from "erotomania," Brock wrote, but some of the more colorful criticism of Hill came from Silberman.

"Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian ‘acting out’," Brock wrote. "Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would never have asked Hill for dates: She had bad breath."

According to Brock, Silberman’s wife Ricky played an even more active role in the campaign to discredit Hill. [Prior to his appointment as a federal judge, Laurence Silberman also was implicated in questionable contacts with Iranian emissaries during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. For details, see Robert Parry’s Trick or Treason.]

After Brock expanded his assault on Hill into a best-selling book, The Real Anita Hill, the Silbermans and other prominent conservatives joined a celebration at the Embassy Row Ritz-Carlton, Brock wrote. Also in attendance was U.S. Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle, the other judge who had voted to reverse North’s Iran-contra convictions. [Sentelle also cast a deciding vote in overturning Iran-contra felony convictions of Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter.]

In 1992, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist named Sentelle to run a three-judge panel that selected special prosecutors. In appointing Sentelle, Rehnquist waived statutory guidance as well as years of precedents that sought to give control of the special-prosecutor apparatus only to senior or retired judges who did not have strong partisan reputations.

By contrast, Sentelle was a junior judge and a protégé of Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Sentelle used his new powers to appoint conservative lawyers to handle sensitive investigations. Sentelle’s selections included conservative activists to investigate alleged offenses by the Clinton administration, most notably Kenneth Starr to examine Clinton’s business and personal affairs.

Brock’s disclosure about the direct interest by federal judges in partisan activities, including dishonest efforts to discredit Anita Hill, an American citizen who had testified about the qualifications of an appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, might have been big news if the United States had a different news media.

Instead, the debate about Brock’s Anita Hill confession focused on whether the admissions of a liar like Brock should ever be believed. There was no independent journalistic effort to evaluate the detailed evidence that Brock presented about the conservative cabal that went to extraordinary lengths to turn Hill’s life into a living hell.

Clinton Fallout

Brock’s admission also might have prompted a fuller discussion of the national press corps' behavior during the Clinton administration.

After the Thomas-Hill controversy, Brock spearheaded another conservative-funded journalistic inquiry into the Clintons’ personal lives. In late 1993, Brock wrote an article for the American Spectator that pulled together various allegations from state troopers and others in Arkansas about the Clintons’ alleged sexual dalliances.

The story provoked a new controversy dubbed "Troopergate," which gave rise to the dubious sexual harassment allegations against Clinton from Paula Jones. The conservative media seized on those charges, in part, as retaliation for the supposedly bogus Anita Hill charges against Clarence Thomas.

Before long, the mainstream news media joined in the pursuit of the "Clinton scandals," leading to an unprecedented press assault on the private lives of a First Family.

As this assault proceeded, there was almost no reporting about the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of a right-wing cabal to regain the White House through scandal-mongering. Indeed, when First Lady Hillary Clinton complained about the "vast right-wing conspiracy" in 1998, her remarks were met with howls of ridicule and derision. [The few exceptions included Salon.com and Consortiumnews.com]

The national press corps behaved then – and continues to behave to this day – as if her allegations were beyond ludicrous. After all, if such a conspiracy had existed, the crack Washington press corps would have known about it, right? [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Quisling Press."]

The Bush Election

Yet, in many ways, the culmination of this media phenomenon was not the impeachment of Clinton in 1998. It was the campaign and election in 2000.

Key journalists at both conservative and mainstream outlets – angered that Clinton had survived eight years of investigations – took out their frustrations on Vice President Al Gore.

Even leading newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, put words into Gore’s mouth about his role in the Love Canal toxic-waste cleanup and then dragged their heels about running corrections. Other bogus Gore quotes became urban legends, such as his supposed assertion that he had "invented" the Internet.

The exaggerated reporting about Gore’s supposed exaggerations also put the banana peel under his foot for the moments when he made real, though minor, slip-ups.

In October, the news media went into overdrive after a presidential debate when Gore incorrectly recalled a trip to Texas with the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Gore had actually gone with the deputy director. The Bush campaign fed the mistake to the press and the error dominated the campaign for a week.

A completely different media posture was apparent when Bush or Cheney made similar or worse misstatements – including Cheney’s lie that the government had not helped him in his business career at the helm of Halliburton Co. The truth was that Cheney had lobbied successfully for federal loan guarantees and other government largesse. Those falsehoods, however, were deemed not worthy of reporting by the major national press.

The Recount Experience

The pattern of looking only one way continued into the Florida recount battle. Gore was portrayed as the aggressor trying to overturn the rightful result of Bush’s victory. Little attention was paid to the maneuverings by the Bush campaign to secure the electoral votes in defiance of the will of the voters.

After the recount battle, BBC journalist Greg Palast disclosed how Jeb Bush’s subordinates had mounted an extraordinary effort to purge felons from the voting rolls and knowingly included legitimate voters with similar names and addresses.

The scheme denied the right to vote to a disproportionate number of African-Americans, but there was scant follow-up in the major news media. The Washington Post did not write its matcher of Palast’s work until almost half a year after the election.

Also in the months after the election, the Bush campaign refused to release details about its recount-battle spending, with barely a whimper from the mainstream press.

Now, nearly six months into the Bush presidency, The New York Times discovers that Bush padded his tiny lead through a strategy of letting in questionable overseas votes in his counties while blocking them in pro-Gore counties.

(To add insult to injury, the Bush campaign got five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court -- including Thomas and Rehnquist -- to block a statewide Florida recount in December on the grounds that disparate standards would be used in counting the votes, exactly what Bush had done with the overseas ballots.)

What the Future Holds

Yet, as Bush finishes his first six months in the White House, the imbalance in the U.S. news media only worsens.

Fox News has become a leading force in cable news as it dishes out a steady diet of conservative opinions and slanted news coverage. "Fox News Channel has become a vanity showcase catering to the Angry White Male in his autumn plumage," observed writer John Wolcott. [Vanity Fair, August 2001]

Bland CNN – now part of the media behemoth AOL Time-Warner – is planning a makeover, presumably to challenge Fox for some of it’s A.W.M. viewers.

Though CNN is sometimes portrayed as the liberal counterweight to Fox, in reality, it gives equal or greater weight to conservative voices, with the "liberals" often represented by centrist journalistic types. By contrast, right-wing columnist Robert Novak does double duty on CNN, giving his opinions and showing up as a reporter.

On the AM dials, Rush Limbaugh and copycat radio opinion hosts continue to rant. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, with his mysterious source of seemingly unlimited cash, continues to subsidize the Washington Times as a daily voice for harsh attacks on Democrats and strong defenses of the Bush administration. The Wall Street Journal editorial page does the same, not to mention Murdoch’s New York Post and other hard-right publications around the country.

Conservatives also dominate the magazine racks with many of their publications, from the Weekly Standard to American Spectator, heavily subsidized either by right-wing funders or conservative foundations coordinating their spending to get the biggest ideological bang for the buck. [For more details about the conservative media, see "Democrats Dilemma."]

By contrast, the Bush-Gore election debacle has sparked virtually no response from well-heeled liberals to support news outlets that could change the current imbalance.

Even as Bush pursues a hard-right agenda – including repudiating the Kyoto global-warming protocol and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty – liberals seem content to cede control of the national news to a combination of hard-charging right-wing bulls and cowed mainstream types.

Except for a few new Web sites, apparently run by rank-and-file Democrats, there has been no change in the media dynamic – and the Web sites clearly reach only a tiny percentage of the American people.

Liberals apparently feel that the situation will either fix itself or can be overcome by more grassroots organizing, a view comparable to the resistance of some companies in the 1950s to shift their marketing from door-to-door salesmen to television advertising. Ironically, the conservatives have shown themselves more amenable to technological change than the liberals.

Despite the new disclosures about Bush campaign shenanigans, the larger reality for now and for the foreseeable future is that conservatives will continue to hold the upper hand on how the press perceives and reports the political news, at least during the crucial days and weeks when power is in the balance.

The June 21st Voluntary Rolling Blackout protest apparently struck a real sore spot with our conservative brethren. For reasons that are totally beyond me, the simple act of turning off a light switch seemed to awaken some primal emotion, buried deep in the hypothalamus, and resulting in some of the least lucid hate mail we have seen to date.

The most common right-wing reaction was, "Oh yeah? Well I am going to turn my lights on and fire up all my appliances and drive around in my big, gas-guzzling SUV." There are so many things wrong with that picture that it is hard to know where to begin.

Set aside, for a moment, the puerile, penis-waving nature of this ‘threat." Set that aside for a moment, although it is hard to ignore, and ask yourself, "What kind of a whack job would spend three hours on a sultry summer evening racing maniacally about the house toasting bread, agitating clothes, and pureeing carrots for the sole purpose of driving up their OWN electric bill?" Imagine living next door to this person. Imagine standing in your driveway watching Bob, who always seemed so normal, unloading an SUV full of bread.

"Er…that’s a lot of bread, Bob."

"Yesiree, Tom. The wife and I are making toast tonight."

"What are you going to do with 4500 pieces of toast, Bob?"

"I’m going to throw it away."

"Throw it away?"

"Well, duh! You don’t think I can eat it all myself, do you? Only a crazy person would eat 4500 pieces of toast!"

Now if I were Tom, I’d be going in the house to make a few phone calls right about now – and the first one would be to my realtor.

But the bad craziness does not end there, folks. Not by a long shot. The toys in the attic are just getting warmed up. Compounding bizarre behavior with tortured logic, the brethren feel compelled to explain that the reason they are engaging in this peculiar solstice ritual is, "Because I am a rich Republican and I can afford it."

I don’t know about you, but when I have a little extra cash to spend, I usually use it for something fun. I might take the family to dinner, or go away for the weekend, or buy a new widget for the house. But I am pretty sure that my husband and I have never had a discussion about what to do with our discretionary income that went like this:

"Hey honey…you know that bonus check I got last week?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Well, I was looking at last month’s water bill and it was only $75.00."

"Good God, sweetie pie! How did that happen? We must turn on all our spigots at once! Junior, get in that bathroom and start flushing! Daddy’s got his bonus check!"

Yes, there are people out there who would beat their own testicles with a rock before turning off a single light switch, and it is really difficult to compose a rational response to someone who informs you that, while you are sitting around the campfire with your friends, s/he will be heating up an empty oven and standing in the front yard with a running chain saw in one hand and an electric-powered Weed Whacker in the other. (Who needs friends when you have Black and Decker? Go figure.)

And it is damn near impossible to explain renewable energy sources to someone who states that, "All energy sources are renewable. If you burn down trees, they grow back, don’t they?" I don’t expect the concept of geologic time means much to a person like that, (a gut-feeling that was later reinforced by this particular writer’s offer to prove this to us "after we annex Canada" by napalming a small section of Canadian woodlands with an F-4 phantom jet).

At least half the mail advised us to stop blaming Bush for the energy crisis, and to start blaming Clinton instead. These are probably the same people who believe we should continue trying to impeach someone who is no longer in office. Besides, I do not recall anyone in the Clinton administration asserting, as Dick Cheney did, that Americans should not be asked to conserve energy as it infringed upon their lifestyle. No, the Rolling Blackout was not an action looking for a scapegoat. But how do you explain that to a group of people who have made scape-goating a way of life for the last eight years?

It would be absurd to go back in time looking for the guy who caused the energy crisis. How long have people been polluting? How long have they been wasting the earth’s natural resources and when did they first start stripping the earth for profits? How long have alternative technologies been ignored by people who had the power to implement them? When was the first missed opportunity to set things right and who was the first person to miss it?

Who knows? What we DO know, and what should be blatantly obvious based solely upon Cheney’s view of conservation, is that this administration will not favor any solution that does not, in turn, favor Big Oil. After all, if we as a nation decide to conserve energy, Dick’s boys lose money. Every dime you save on your power bill is a dime you have and they don’t.

And developing new technology costs money. Could Dick and Dubya promote legislation to offer tax incentives to corporations for implementation of solar power plants and wind farms? Yes. Will they do it? No.

Why? Because they plan on cutting corporate taxes anyway. If their cronies are able to stick with the old technology, they stand to profit more than if they have to spend some of their windfall on developing energy alternatives.

The energy crisis is most certainly more complex than you or I, as outsiders, know. However the Bush administration’s blind refusal to discuss renewable energy sources and conservation reflects an unacceptably short-sighted attitude toward a long-term problem that will affect generations yet to come. This was the message contained in our Voluntary Rolling Blackout. Unfortunately, our new conservative - just what, exactly, is it that they conserve anyway? - pen friends were too busy turning on light switches and writing hate mail to think about the challenges their children and their grandchildren might face when the oil well runs dry.

As for the mail itself, the winner of the Psychotic Drivel of the Week award goes to K.H., who hails from parts unknown. S/he writes:

"DEAR SIRS, YOU ARE SICK PEOPLE! I WOULD BE SORRY FOR YOU IF YOU WEREN’T SO FRIGHTENING. BE SURE, WE WILL BE WATCHING YOU, TO KEEP YOU FROM INFECTING OTHERS."

WASHINGTON—For all the talk of a compromise on embryonic stem cell research, many leaders in the anti-abortion movement say they are counting on President Bush to abide by his campaign promises and hold the line against federal financing for such research.

If he reneges, some of these leaders say, the consequences will be substantial —not just the political fallout from breaking faith with some of his most loyal supporters in last year's campaign, but also, these conservative activists argue, a first step down a very slippery slope for the culture at large.

"There should be a nonnegotiable principle that says innocent human life is sacrosanct and on this we will not compromise," said Ken Connor, president of the conservative Family Research Council, alluding to the microscopic embryos that must be destroyed to extract the stem cells.

Richard Doerflinger, the point man on this issue at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said: "It has no convincing stopping point once you begin funding some of this research. And I think it gives up the moral argument at its core."

That line-in-the-sand position, which also comes from the National Right to Life Committee, longtime anti-abortion activists like Phyllis Schlafly and an array of other social conservatives, underscores the dilemma for President Bush. He faces an army of patients groups and scientists pleading for the federally financed research to go forward, arguing that the cells hold great promise in treating diseases and repairing damaged tissue and organs. But a critical part of his base, the social conservatives, argue just as passionately that the financing is wrong.

Moreover, many of them vividly recall his campaign pledge on the issue. "He took a stand in our own presidential candidate questionnaire, which we published in Catholic newspapers in October," Mr. Doerflinger said. What Mr. Bush said: "Taxpayer funds should not underwrite research that involves the destruction of live human embryos."

Since 1995 Congress has imposed a ban on federal financing for research in which human embryos are destroyed. But the Clinton administration ruled last year that this ban would not extend to stem cell research as long as no federally financed researchers were involved in obtaining the cells and thus destroying the embryos.

Social conservatives asserted that this was a meaningless distinction to circumvent the law. Mr. Bush must decide whether to continue that policy.

Anti-abortion activists say that despite the defection of a handful of their usual allies on this issue, notably Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, the movement as a whole is unified and strong in its opposition.

"There is no division in the pro-life movement about this," said Douglas E. Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. "All of the organizations, both denominational and secular, that have supported pro-life policies over the years are of one mind —strongly opposed to the federal funding of research that involves killing human embryos."

The activists also say that despite speculation to the contrary, they are counting on Mr. Bush to stand firm. "My experience has been, and Karl Rove and others have said it many times, `Look, if the president said this in the campaign, you can go to the bank on it,' " Mr. Connor said.

Mr. Rove, who has extensive contacts with conservatives, is one of the voices who will weigh in on any decision. He has presented the anti-research arguments at White House meetings and outlined the political ramifications of the difficult issue, on which some members of the Bush administration are divided. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson is considered a research supporter.

Gary L. Bauer, the conservative activist, said of President Bush, "He's been willing to go into the face of significant attacks on his tax cut and on missile defense, and I'm still holding out hope that he will ultimately do the same thing on this —although with each passing day, my concerns grow."

In fact, these are anxious days for the movement. Leaders are mobilizing troops and working to put a human face on their side of the debate, keenly aware that the plight of patients afflicted with diabetes or Parkinson's disease, who argue that research on stem cells could someday lead to a cure, has swayed many to the other side.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a letter delivered to members of the House and Senate today, declared: "We know that speculations about the possible benefits of such research, and mistaken views about the status of the human embryo, have led many to urge you to abandon your convictions. We believe it is more important than ever to stand for the principle that the government must not treat any living human being as research material, as a mere means for benefit to others."

The letter also warned, "You can make a difficult but correct decision now —or set the stage for all-but- impossible decisions in the future for yourself and your successors, as a research enterprise impatient with moral limits increasingly leads us into a culture of death." The letter was signed by the conference's president, the Rev. Joseph A. Fiorenza, bishop of Galveston-Houston.

Next week, opponents of the research will use a House subcommittee hearing to showcase children who were adopted as frozen embryos. Samuel B. Casey, senior counsel to Human Life Advocates, who is helping to organize their appearance, said in an interview, "The argument that's been made by those who want to change or lift the federal ban on destructive embryonic stem cell research is that these embryos are in excess, we're just going to throw them out anyway."

Mr. Casey added that the appearance of the children —a 2-year-old girl and 9-month-old twins —emdash would send a different message, "That every child who is a frozen human embryo needs to be thought of as in a frozen orphanage."

Under the Clinton guidelines, the stem cells would be obtained from frozen embryos —stored in fertility clinics —hat were no longer wanted by the couples that created them.

Behind the anti-abortion movement's strong opposition, there are a few signs that some compromises would be viewed as better than others —for example, the idea of permitting federal financing of research on the limited number of cell lines previously developed from embryos, but no new ones. Dr. Richard D. Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said that while he would oppose such a compromise, "it would not jeopardize his standing as a pro-life president," in contrast to other possibilities.

If Mr. Bush allowed financing for research on new cell lines, and by extension the destruction of more embryos to create them, Dr. Land said, "It would be the cultural conservatives' equivalent of going back on the no-new-taxes pledge of a previous administration."

Mrs. Schlafly, the veteran activist, said: "I think it will severely damage him if he goes the wrong way on it. It's not like we're asking him to take a new position or get a new bill through. It's just enforcing the law."

Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, said today that the president had been meeting with a range of people on this issue, and that he would "continue to listen very carefully to all sides of this issue, so that when he makes his decision it will be a very informed decision, it will be a very sensitive decision, it will be a decision that recognizes the deep complexities that this matter raises for our society."

The other day, in the little patch of green and shade across from the Capitol known as the Swamp, there unfolded an unintended pageant about the power of money in American politics and about corporate clout on domestic and foreign issues.

In the stifling heat of high noon, two days before the climactic House vote, nervous backers of campaign finance reform exhorted the faithful to rescue politics from the bottom line. Scott Harshbarger, president of Common Cause, one of the lead organizations in the showdown over soft money, warned that if the flow is not stopped, "corporations and wealthy individuals will decide the agenda of Congress." Harshbarger had in mind, of course, mega-moneybags such as the NRA, the pharmaceutical companies, Big Tobacco. Their lobbyists swarmed through the corridors last week, threatening to cut funds of members who messed around with big business's right to purchase congressmen and their votes.

Every interest but the public's was represented. The buttonholers want to guarantee that campaign contributions are going to be more important than campaigns.

The struggle was so intense between reformers and guardians of the status quo that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was blasted out of his usual blandness. On "Face the Nation" two weeks ago, he accused Sen. John McCain of writing "bullying" letters to Republican House members who were welching on their word to support reform -- as they had indicated they would when they were begging him to campaign for them.

The Republican leadership obviously feared that an up or down vote on Shays-Meehan, the House version of McCain-Feingold, could be dangerous either way. If it passed, they would have less cash, and if it failed, they would be charged with killing it. Although they insist that the electorate doesn't really care about changing the system, they can't be sure.

Just in case, they created a cat's cradle of rules designed to strangle Shays-Meehan, requiring individual votes on the amendments that were meant to shore up waverers. All day Thursday, pitched battles were waged in the House: Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt all but went down on his knees to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who felt their campaign freedom of expression was being curtailed; McCain told the troops they must vote against the rule that would take reform to the floor. In the end, campaign reform sank in a sea of recriminations.

But back to the swamp on Tuesday. The reformers' podium was taken over by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Her mission was to reproach House members for meddling in another cause dear to the hearts of corporate America, the awarding of the 2008 Olympics to China. She said the Olympics should be kept out of politics.

Patty Murray is no patsy for corporate America: She has gone to China and confronted officials on their appalling human rights record. But she was touched, she says, by the "tragic" plight of American athletes who couldn't compete in the 1980 Moscow Games. There are other avenues of protest; Olympic scrutiny and interaction will do wonders.

A group of hardy human rights advocates in the House -- Tom Lantos, Nancy Pelosi, Frank Wolf and Christopher Smith -- noted that these avenues have led nowhere. Every time China wants something -- such as special trade status, or membership in the World Trade Organization -- and we scramble to provide it, we hear the same refrain: Give China what it wants, it will soften, mellow, and find better things to do than torture and execute its citizens. It never happens.

From the first, U.S. business has looked at China and seen a market, not a repressive military dictatorship that brutally punishes talk of democracy, bullies its neighbors, peddles arms to outlaw nations and blackmails the world. The auxiliary argument is that if we didn't let China have the Olympics, the dragon would get even nastier, although it is hard to see how. While primping for the Olympics, China downed a U.S. plane, detained the crew and sent the plane back in pieces. It indulged in an orgy of executions in the past three months -- 1,781 Chinese, according to Amnesty International, more than the world figure for the past three years.

And yet the world's greatest democracy meekly took a neutral position on the Beijing Games. We got nothing for it. Why couldn't we extract a price? We could have demanded the release of American University fellow Gao Zhan, a permanent U.S. resident. She was snatched by police at the Beijing airport on Feb. 11. She was torn away from her husband and 5-year-old son. No one who cares about her has seen her since.

For these reasons, "We have no credibility on this issue whatever," says Stephen Rickard, a veteran human rights activist and erstwhile human rights director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center.