Candidates are targeting evangelical base in W.Va.

According to an article by Rick Klein in yesterday's Boston Globe, the Kerry campaign is putting on a serious fight for West Virginia.

BECKLEY, W.Va. -- Bush campaign volunteers are calling their fellow churchgoers. The Christian Coalition's voting guides will ship out shortly. And pastors across West Virginia are making the case -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so -- that President Bush is a better choice on spiritual grounds than Democrat John F. Kerry.

Yet whether devout Christians will turn out en masse for Bush remains uncertain. The Republicans' network of pastors and religious voters is proving something less than rock-solid in a state and a region hit hard by manufacturing job losses, and with many sons and daughters serving in a war that has grown unpopular. In the campaign's final month, the Kerry campaign is beginning to escalate its fight for religious voters in West Virginia.

Secret weapon? Some evangelical pastors disgusted with the * administration.

"We've been misled by our president," said Pastor David Allen of the Welcome Baptist Church in Beckley, who is urging parishioners to support Kerry. "We have become the aggressor instead of the peacemaker in Iraq. God is not Republican or Democratic -- he's for what's right."

And Senator Robert Byrd.

Bumper stickers are popping up in Charleston, the capital, and elsewhere in the state: "Christian and a Democrat," they read, with the Christian fish symbol next to a Democratic donkey.

Last week, a group called Clergy and Lay People in Support of John Kerry announced its start in West Virginia, saying a president who engages in preemptive war is not living by the doctrine of Christ. The state's senior political figure, US Senator Robert C. Byrd, hammered home that point on Monday at a rally in Beckley, where he blasted Bush as a hypocrite who is trying to exploit religion for political gain.

West Virginia may be fertile ground for voters who are persuaded by wedge issues,

[b]ut in West Virginia, religion is not the domain of only one political party. Gary Abernathy, executive director of the West Virginia Republican Party, said social issues are rarely crucial in in-state races, since the Democratic and Republican candidates often share the same views. He noted that Democrats from outside the state, such as Al Gore four years ago and Kerry this year, have a tough time relating to West Virginia voters.

Even so, Democrats have served notice that they will not let religious campaigning stand without an answer. To make a case against Bush Monday, Byrd sang "Amazing Grace" and quoted Scriptures. "The Bible, in the Gospel of Matthew, teaches, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' " Byrd said, according to The Register-Herald of Beckley. "But what fruits do we see around us? We see division and discord. We see the hungry and the homeless. We see a nation divided by the very leaders who promised to unite us.

"We ought to rise up and vote, vote for John Kerry. Hallelujah, thank God."

At the Welcome Baptist Church in Beckley, Pastor Allen has a response for anyone who says Bush would make a better president because of Christian values: "I can't hear what you're saying, because I see what you're doing."