AMERICA has a new heartthrob — the Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, whose square-jawed, clean-cut good looks and preppie sartorial style are winning hearts and minds.

Roberts’s image as a “regular guy”, as President George W Bush called him, as well as a top legal eagle may help him secure the nomination as the first new Supreme Court justice for 11 years in what has threatened to become a nasty confirmation battle with Democrats in Congress.

Style experts are fawning over the 50-year-old judge’s “Kennedy-esque dimple”, so reminiscent of the assassinated Kennedy brothers John and Robert, and “collegiate panache”. Others are comparing him to the actor Larry Hagman, who played a handsome astronaut in the television series I Dream of Jeannie before adopting the more sinister role of JR Ewing in Dallas.

Lois Joy Johnson, fashion and beauty editor of the glossy women’s magazine More, said: “Roberts looks like a soap opera star. They say Washington is Hollywood without the sex appeal but they’ve finally got it. He’s sexy. American women will love him.”

Roberts’s adopted fair-haired children, Josie, 5, and Jack, 4 — who naughtily danced away from his mother’s side while Bush was announcing his father’s nomination — are being touted as the perfect accessories.

Men are also succumbing to his charm. David Brooks, a conservative commentator, penned a glowing sonnet to Roberts in The New York Times. “Roberts’s nomination, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” he wrote.

“I love thee with the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee because this is the way government is supposed to work.”

Brooks was referring to the judicious nature of Bush’s candidate — Roberts, a Harvard law graduate and appeal court judge in Washington DC, appears eminently qualified for the post. But it is Roberts the man that has disarmed critics as much as his legal record.

Adam Rapoport, style editor of the men’s magazine GQ, said: “Democrats are having a hard time finding reasons to oppose him. He’s a handsome all-American guy, who looks like a nice, level-headed person, not a scheming politician.”

So far the biggest counterblast against Roberts’s nomination has come from the right, not the left. The firebrand conservative columnist Ann Coulter launched a fierce attack, comparing him to an alien.

“Let’s ponder the fact that Roberts has gone through 50 years on this planet without ever saying anything controversial. That’s just unnatural,” she wrote. “It is as if he is from some space alien sleeper cell.

“Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never,” she concluded. But most die-hard American rightwingers, who are being subjected to a White House charm offensive, are holding their breath and hoping for the best.

At issue are the judge’s little-known views on the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Roe v Wade, which permits legal abortion in America and is a litmus test for conservatives and liberals when deciding if a nominee is “one of them”.

The Christian right has been seeking to overturn the pro-abortion ruling ever since it became law in 1973. With another vacancy looming because of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s ailing health, there is a chance to shape the politics of the Supreme Court for decades to come.

As a fit and healthy 50-year-old who played American football and wrestled in his youth, Roberts could remain on the bench for the next 30 years.

A poll by AP/Ipsos last week showed that 52% of men and 60% of women wanted to know his position on abortion before the Senate votes to confirm him.

When he served as a lawyer for the first President George Bush’s administration, Roberts argued that Roe v Wade was “wrongly decided”, but he may merely have been upholding government policy. In the confirmation hearings for his present job as an appeal court judge, he described the verdict as the “settled law of the land”.

The Roberts family is Catholic and the role of his career lawyer wife, Jane, in the crusading anti-abortion organisation Feminists for Life, is now coming under scrutiny. But the group claims to focus, as Jane wrote in a 1998 affidavit, on eliminating “through practical solutions, the root causes of driving girls and women to abortion”.

Although Roberts’s record continues to be minutely examined for signs of political incorrectness over civil rights and other touchstone issues, Democrats are becoming resigned to his confirmation.

Joe Lieberman, a leading Democrat senator, said the judge could not in any sense be described as extremist.

Many women, including the retiring Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, are disappointed that Bush failed to appoint a woman to replace her. Yet according to More’s beauty editor, “women in America have always been able to separate a man’s looks from his politics”. On that basis, she said, Roberts was a winner.

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