US elections: A referendum on men behaving badly?

WASHINGTON, Saturday (AP) - The news from some of this year's political campaigns reads more like the script for a tawdry soap opera. And that is inspiring candidates and party leaders to execute some creative campaign strategies to try to maintain the moral high ground.

In Nov. 7 congressional elections, Republicans are working to keep the majority they have held in both chambers of Congress for a decade. Democrats are hoping that recent scandals, as well as discontent with President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, will give them an upper hand. In Pennsylvania, four-term Republican Congressman Don Sherwood is running for his political life after revelations that he had a five-year extramarital affair, and that he settled a lawsuit claiming he had choked the woman. He denies the choking part.White House spokesman Tony Snow was left to explain why Bush had agreed to campaign on behalf of a confessed adulterer. Bush ''believes that we're all sinners, we all seek forgiveness, and in this particular case, he's supporting Don Sherwood's candidacy,'' the spokesman gamely offered.

The president himself managed to cast the matter in upbeat terms during a campaign appearance Thursday with the Sherwood family, praising Sherwood's wife as a ''caring and courageous woman'' because of a letter she wrote to constituents in which she denounced her husband's opponent for showing campaign ads about the affair.

Sherwood's opponent, Democrat Chris Carney, has run ads telling voters that the congressman ''went to Washington and didn't remember the values of this district.''

In Nevada, another loyal wife stood beside Republican Congressman Jim Gibbons, the leading candidate in the state's governor's race, as he denied claims that he had assaulted and propositioned a woman he'd been drinking with during a raucous night at a restaurant bar earlier this month. The woman made three calls to police and gave a statement to officers about the alleged assault, but she later chose not to pursue the matter.

''I'm a happily married man, a father and a grandfather,'' Gibbons proclaimed Thursday, clenching his wife Dawn's hand. Gibbons said the woman, who he said ''might have been tipsy,'' tripped outside the restaurant and he tried to help her up.

''Gosh, I learned an important lesson, never to offer a helping hand to anybody ever again,'' he said.

But the Republicans are not the only ones who have found themselves in unsavory situations.

In Minnesota, Democratic House candidate Keith Ellison and a woman who claimed she had an affair with him have sought dueling restraining orders.

Ellison, the leading candidate for an open House seat, denies he had an affair with Amy Alexander, who says they had an on-and-off relationship for 12 years. Ellison obtained a restraining order against her last year, and claims she tried to extort $10,000 (euro8,000) in hush money. Alexander sought her own restraining order against him. On Wednesday, Ellison filed papers asking a judge to dismiss Alexander's request. In Florida, there's the granddaddy of this year's sexcapades, which, so far at least, doesn't appear to involve any actual sex.

Republican Congressman Mark Foley, who had been expected to win re-election, abruptly resigned last month after allegations surfaced that he sent sexually explicit instant messages to teenage male assistants, known as pages.

Since then, there has been a steady stream of revelations about his contacts with pages, and plenty of circular finger-pointing among Republican House leaders about who should have reined him in.

Foley, who is gay, said he wasn't trying to excuse his behavior but let it be known that he was an alcoholic and had been sexually molested by a clergyman when he was a boy. Now, a Roman Catholic diocese has opened an investigation into the conduct of a priest who said he fondled and shared naked saunas with Foley when the congressman was an altar boy. There's plenty of evidence, if any is needed, that people are turned off by the taint on politics. Scandal and corruption rank among the top concerns for likely voters, with three-fourths saying those issues are very important to them personally and almost half saying they will be very important in vote, according to Associated Press-Ipsos polling.