On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, no

Joe Hughes, Bennett Hoffman and Rhonda Scott are not stupid. They are not morons. They are not idiots. Nor are they, as media critic Bernard Goldberg suggested last week on the Fox News channel, mentally defective.

They are -- yes, even at this very late date -- undecided voters.

They cannot yet say whether they’re voting for President Bush or his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry. Shockingly, they like some things about each candidate and dislike things about each candidate. “The Daily Show’s” angry essayist, Lewis Black, finds such people “stupid, stupid, stupid.” But when undecided voters actually chat about the election, there does not appear to be anything defective or stupid about them. They might actually -- and here is a revolutionary thought -- be too thoughtful about this campaign.

Take Bennett Hoffman, a 39-year-old Minnesota state employee who lives in a suburb of St. Paul. He says the environment is the issue he feels most strongly about. And yet, he just couldn’t bring himself to vote for Vice President Al Gore, the environmentalist, in 2000. “It went down to the last day,” he says. “What pushed me in the Republican direction was that I liked Dick Cheney in terms of his leadership and his experience.”

This year, says Hoffmann, he is leaning toward Bush again. “I just think there’s a lot of unknowns with John Kerry. I’m afraid he’ll raise taxes and mess some things up.”

And yet. (Here is where we plunge into the mind of the undecided voter, the only member of the electorate for whom there is an “and yet.”) The war against Iraq was “not necessarily the right thing to do -- maybe eventually it might have been,” says Hoffman.

He is also bothered by Bush’s stewardship of the economy. “I agree some tax relief is necessary and companies have to create jobs,” says Hoffman, “but if it’s going to cause a budget deficit, we’re going to be harmed in the long run. It doesn’t help for me to get money back if I have to pay more for healthcare or don’t get a pay raise.”

And yet (ahem), because he belongs to a labor union, said Hoffman, “it would be better for me personally if a Democrat was elected.”

When, exactly, is this guy gonna make up his mind?

“I never really make up my mind until the day of the election,” he says. One can almost hear the campaign strategists’ teeth gnashing.

Undecided voters, for all the attention they’ve been paid, are actually pretty few and far between this year -- “thin on the ground,” as pollsters say. In the most recent Los Angeles Times poll, released last week, about 6% of voters were still making up their minds. That compares to about 16% who were undecided a month before the 2000 election and about 17% who said they were undecided just before the 1996 election. Other polling organizations have put the figure higher this year, at about 12%.

“They’re very conflicted,” says Curtis Gans, director of the Washington-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “They are not very comfortable reelecting George Bush, but they’re not sure John Kerry is the kind of leader that they want. I think that undecided voters often stay home, but that’s not going to happen this year. A lot of people feel that this is the most important election of their lifetime.”

On Tuesday, Rhonda Scott, 26, will cast her first-ever vote for president. “I want to make sure I make a decision that I can live with,” says Scott, who works in the human resources department of a large corporation in San Antonio, solidly in Bush country. Her boyfriend, she said, “thinks Bush can do no wrong.” Yet she is leaning toward Kerry.

She thinks Bush moved too precipitously in Iraq: “He probably should have let the U.N. inspectors go in one more time. What did we have to lose?”

She is for embryonic stem cell research, which Bush has put strict limits on, but she is conflicted about abortion, which Bush is against. “I am a woman and I don’t want anyone telling me what to do with my body, but then, there’s the issue of: ‘Is it life, and is it right for us to take it?’ ”

She also thinks the president’s attention has drifted from an area that’s important to her. “It doesn’t seem like Bush is too focused on the economy right now,” says Scott. “Some of the decisions he’s made, he doesn’t seem to get how it’s affected everybody -- like his tax cuts for the higher class. His logic is trickle-down economics, but the reason rich people are rich is because they don’t spend money.”

Like Scott, Joe Hughes, who lives in a small Mississippi town, is basically surrounded by Republicans. He voted for Bush in 2000, but this year the 60-year-old drywall worker who drives 50 miles to work is wavering. He’s upset about the economy, high gas prices and the war in Iraq. He is in favor of gay marriage, which Bush opposes, and embryonic stem cell research.

Hughes is also righteously ticked off about a tax loophole that was meant to help business owners buy heavy equipment and instead has allowed them to write off the cost of ultra-expensive SUVs, like Hummers. “That wasn’t right,” he says. “That was just to give the people in power and their friends a way to have something to play with.

“This time,” says Hughes. “It’s sure hard for me to vote for Bush.”

A few undecided voters, such as Ralph Reiley, an architect who lives near Atlanta, are still up in the air because they feel they are making a choice between unwinnable and unpalatable. “The only one I’m sure I’m not voting for is Bush,” says Reiley, 48, who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. This year, Nader is not on the ballot in Georgia, and Reiley is struggling with whether to vote for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik, a computer programmer from Texas, or Kerry.

“If I vote my conscience, I can’t vote for a Republican or a Democrat,” says Reiley. “I think Iraq is a train wreck. As for the economy, I don’t think the president has much to do with that. And I don’t think the government should have anything to do with healthcare.”

Reiley may not know who he’s voting for Tuesday, but he is sure of one thing: “No matter who I vote for, I lose.”