You hear a prettier version of the same story on Sunday morning at the Forest Drive Baptist Church in Columbia. It's about half an hour before services are to begin, and a few women are sitting around a table in the immaculate church hall. Ask them what issues are important to them in 2004, and they say "issues involving people." Ask them if members of the church are mostly Republican or mostly Democrat, and they say they have absolutely no idea. But spend a few minutes with them, and their opinions and their allegiances become clear. They like the president -- they pray for the president -- because he's a man of God. "Without having a man who can hear from God, the country can't be run right," says Melissa Penney. Do any of the Democratic contenders hear from God? Penney says she doesn't know. "If they're Christians, they do," she says.

Forest Drive Baptist is a mixed-race church, but Penney is the only African-American in the small group of women talking around the table. After she walks away, Anne Abel begins to talk about her thoughts on the Democratic primary Tuesday. It's an open primary. And while Abel generally votes Republican, she is thinking about crossing over to vote for what she considers the lesser of the evils among the Democratic contenders.

"There are a couple of candidates I strongly oppose in that I think that their positions would be dangerous for our country," says Abel, who works in an assisted living facility for senior citizens. "So if I feel that the Lord gives me the freedom to [vote in the primary] and I feel like I can do that, I would probably vote for one of the other ones."

She doesn't name names at first, but she eventually says that she's particularly concerned about Sen. John Kerry because of his "liberal stance on gay marriage and abortion." Told that Kerry -- like all of the major Democratic contenders -- actually opposes gay marriage, she points to the fact that the highest court in Kerry's home state of Massachusetts has ruled in favor of gay marriages. And, she says, "The fact that Senator Ted Kennedy has endorsed him highly concerns me."

With the exception of Al Sharpton, who isn't going to be his party's nominee, there isn't a Democrat in the field who can outdo George Bush when it comes to God-talk, at least in the eyes of the born-again Christians who play such an influential role in Southern politics. Howard Dean and Wesley Clark have both tried, without much success. Lieberman impresses Southern Christians as a serious religious man, but the wrong kind. While John Edwards plays up his status as a Southerner -- in his stump speech, he says that the South "isn't George Bush's backyard, it's mine" -- he has not wrapped his rhetoric in the language of the faithful. And Kerry mentions faith nearly never. Indeed, he has said: "I don't make decisions in public life based on religious belief."

Kerry supporters hope they can win over Southern voters in other ways. Kerry's campaign has flooded South Carolina with veterans and firefighters who support his candidacy, hoping that their presence in the state will give comfort to Southern voters who sometimes see the Democrats as the party of wimps.

And Fleer says that Democrats may be able to make inroads with white Southern voters if they can begin to persuade them that it is Republicans -- not Democrats -- who are fiscally reckless. Howard Dean made just such an argument at the debate in South Carolina Thursday night, pointing out that recent Republican presidents had run up huge deficits while Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget. Fleer would like to see more of the same, even as he acknowledges that it's a "counterintuitive" argument for voters conditioned to think of Democrats as "tax and spend" liberals.

The trouble is, economic issues don't seem to trump the cultural issues that are important to many Southern white voters. In part, at least, that's because some of them have simply not suffered much from the nation's economic woes. At Forest Drive Baptists, for example, the women gathered around the table say that most of the families in the church continue to do relatively well. There's a reason for that, says Susan Thomas, an elementary school P.E. teacher who is married to the church's senior pastor. "There's a verse in the Bible that say the righteous, you'll never see them begging for anything," says Thomas. "Honestly, God has been very gracious to many of our people, in preserving them. We find that yeah, we have some tough times and some tough stuff ... but God has been so gracious, and our church has been very blessed."

Those same blessings haven't reached everywhere. The unemployment rate hovers around 20 percent in some South Carolina counties, especially in places where mills have closed or companies have taken jobs overseas. At campaign stops in these places -- where the audiences are mostly if not exclusively African-American -- no one seems interested in hearing about anything other than the economy.

"I'm looking for a president who's for all the people," says Shenell Floyd, a 28-year-old college student and call-center worker who turned out to see Edwards and a representative for Rep. Dennis Kucinich speak at Allen Temple AME Church in Greenville last week. "I want to see where the candidates really stand on getting jobs and helping people."

Even questions about the war in Iraq come wrapped in economic worries. At a candidates' forum in Greenville last week, Elaine Johnson held a framed photograph of her son, Darius, a soldier in the U.S. Army killed last November when a missile struck his helicopter near Fallujah. Johnson is angry about the war -- she referred to it as "unjust" -- but that's not what she wanted to discuss with the candidates. She wanted to ask what they were going to do about the economy, how they were going to make sure that a young man or woman graduating from high school has options other than military service. "Young people should join the military because they want to be soldiers, not because there are no jobs," Johnson said when she had the chance to put a question to Edwards.

And out in Darlington, Bernard Ervin is also concerned about the war in economic terms. He knows that Congress has given President Bush $87.5 billion to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq -- that number, that $87.5 billion, has a way of sticking in the minds of people who otherwise don't pay much attention to federal budget issues -- and he wonders why there isn't money like that to help people like him.

"All that money going by in the war," he says, shaking his head. "When small businesses around here go looking for loans, it's not there. When people around here go looking for help, they can't get it. There's something wrong with that."

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