AFTER much “prayerful” thought a devout senator known as “Saint Sam” has entered the American presidential race, hoping to fill a gap in the Republican party for a candidate who can appeal to its Christian conservative base.

Sam Brownback, 50, a fiscally conservative, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, evangelical Christian turned Roman Catholic, has announced his intention to challenge Senator John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, for the 2008 Republican nomination. His supporters believe that they can exploit the differences between socially conservative Republicans and the two frontrunners.

“There is certainly room out there,” Brownback said in an interview. He had been encouraged, he said, by a warm reception in Iowa, whose caucuses traditionally provide the first indication of the favoured candidate: “I was in Iowa on Monday and people were very excited to see a person in the field they could identify with.”

The number of politicians who fancy their chances of winning the White House is swelling rapidly. Brownback formed a presidential exploratory committee last week, a necessary first step to financing a campaign.

“I’m in it to win,” he said. “I want to save lives, rebuild the family and rebuild the culture of the country.” In a dig at some of his rivals, he added, “I don’t have to change to be ideologically acceptable.”

Brownback will vie for the support of the Republican base with Mitt Romney, a Mormon, whose religion is regarded as a cult by some evangelical Christians. The top-tier candidates are well ahead of him in money and organisation, but he could become the Republican kingmaker.

“What Sam could do very effectively,” said the Rev Rob Schenck of Faith and Action, the evangelical group, “is hold the nomination hostage until the Christian right exacts the last pledge out of the more popular candidate.”

Brownback, a farm boy from Kansas who married a Midwestern newspaper heiress, is enormously popular with colleagues in the Senate who hope some of his appeal to “values voters” will rub off on them.

He was just stepping out of the lift to vote on a bill last week when Hillary Clinton tapped him on the shoulder and said smilingly, “Hi Sam”.

Brownback admits to “hating” Clinton when he became a congressman in the 1990s but apologised to her at a prayer breakfast that she attends in the Senate. Were they to go head to head for the presidency, he said: “I’d challenge her day and night, but I wouldn’t hate her. Hate is wrong and it is easy for hatred to penetrate us.”

Like his hero William Wilberforce, the British anti-slavery campaigner, Brownback believes that God has called him to politics rather than the church. During a Senate debate on stem cell research, he held up a picture of an embryo drawn by a seven-year-old “snowflake” — a girl adopted as a frozen embryo by an infertile couple — and said it was asking: “Are you going to kill me?” Abortion is a “holocaust”, in Brownback’s view, and the “best place to raise children is between a mom and a dad”. Yet he is not a stereotypical “God, guns and gays” conservative, who wants to pull up a drawbridge against the modern world.

Another of his role models is Bono, the U2 singer, with whom he has worked on Aids and malaria in Africa. “His language can get out of control,” Brownback concedes, “but his practical Christianity is very appealing.”

In the 2008 campaign Brownback hopes to emulate Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who came from nowhere to galvanise the Democratic party base in the last election and rattle the leading contenders.

If, like Dean, he fails to make it through the primaries, he may fight the good fight in another four years: “I’m the one that has been there, is there and will always be there in the future. God’s work is never done.”

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