US: On the campaign trail, US Vice-President Dick Cheney is the reluctant candidate. Now that Sen John Kerry has picked a running mate however, the former CEO of Haliburton has little choice but to take to the hustings regularly to level the playing field and pitch for votes. Conor O'Clery reports from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
He does so with cold, businesslike efficiency.
Yesterday he arrived a quarter of an hour early to address a fund-raising breakfast in the Holiday Inn on the rainswept outskirts of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a key battleground state. Twenty minutes or so later he was gone. If you were parking your car you missed him. It is much the same wherever he goes.
Yesterday he was accompanied by his wife, Lynne, as he swung through Pennsylvania, presenting a small family tableau at events in Bethlehem, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh to match the images last week of Sen John Edwards the family man, who made riotous appearances with his wife and three children and the extended Kerry clan.
The Cheneys' daughter, Mary, also travels with him occasionally, as she is director of vice-presidential operations for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, and his 10-year-old granddaughter, Kate. The Vice-President and his wife were showing themselves together yesterday against a background of a public rift on Sunday over gay marriage, when Lynne Cheney told CNN that states should have the final say over the legal status of civil unions, which was an indirect statement of support for Mary Cheney, who is a lesbian.
This puts Lynne Cheney at odds with her husband, who took the same position in 2000, but who now sides with President Bush in supporting a constitutional change to ban gay marriage, a vote-getter on the right.
The subject didn't come up here. Introducing the Vice-President, Lynne Cheney emphasised his small-town background as a teenager who loaded trucks for a dollar an hour and once held a union ticket, "which will be a surprise to you folks".
Like John Edwards, who always mentions his father was a mill worker, Mr Cheney is a multimillionaire who knows the importance of having blue-collar roots.
He began his speech to the 250 steel-town Republicans, who barely had time to finish their hash browns and scrambled eggs, with his routine joke about how, if he hadn't met Lynne, she would have married somebody else who right now would be vice-president. Then, head down, he read his text in a flat monotone as if running through a company report.
Mr Cheney doesn't like interruptions for applause. Last week he hushed an over-enthusiastic audience with the admonition, "You guys want to hear this speech or not?"
The diners in Bethlehem obliged, giving him only perfunctory applause by the standards of American campaign rallies and the briefest of standing ovations when he finished.
Mr Cheney came out badly from Friday's Senate Intelligence Committee report which showed that pre-war intelligence did not justify the absolute statements he had made about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But he showed he was going to play hardball to counter any criticism from the Democrats.
"When Congress voted to authorise force against Saddam Hussein, Sen Kerry and Sen Edwards both voted yes," he said.
"Now it seems they've both developed a convenient case of campaign amnesia. Let's review the facts. Sen Kerry is a former member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen Edwards sits on that committee today. They saw detailed intelligence on Saddam Hussein. On the Senate floor, Sen Kerry said Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and that those weapons were an unacceptable threat.
"Many times prior to the war in Iraq, Sen Kerry described Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, and said that this was 'always his position on Iraq'. And Sen Edwards, in an interview on TV, called Iraq, 'the most serious and imminent threat to our country'. For those reasons, John Kerry and John Edwards voted to authorise force. Now they're trying to have it both ways. Now they're trying to suggest that they didn't look at the intelligence, or that they didn't conclude for themselves that Saddam Hussein represented a danger.
Every American needs to know that there was widespread agreement on the nature of the threat from Iraq's former dictator. Our administration, the Congress, members of the UN Security Council, members of the previous administration - all reviewed the intelligence and all concluded Saddam Hussein was a threat.
"Sen Kerry and Sen Edwards are criticising the President for looking at the same information they did and coming to the same conclusion they did. If the President was right, and he was, then they are simply trying to rewrite history for their own political purposes."
When he finished Mr Cheney gave a half-smile and a little wave and exited quickly through a side door. He headed straight for a convoy of black SUVs and sped off without shaking hands or mingling with the breakfast guests, who had paid $500 a plate to hear him support the local Republican Congressional candidate, Charles Dent.
The war would be an important issue, Mr Dent told me afterwards, but he didn't believe the setbacks in Iraq would damage the Republican vote.
Others said, as they lingered over coffee, that grassroots Republican support for Cheney was strong, and they could not agree with former Republican senator Alfonse D'Amato, who last week called for Mr Cheney to be dropped from the ticket as a liability. They strongly supported the Vice-President's assertion that "terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness." A local doctor said, as he finished off his bagel, "Better we fight them in Iraq than on the New Jersey Turnpike."