"Character" is the mantra of Bush's campaign against Vice President Al Gore and President Clinton. He mentioned "character" nine times in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. In other speeches he's made as many as 20 references to character. He's even pledged doubling funding for "character education," whatever that is.

The only problem with all his talk about character is that it really doesn't tell us very much about, well, Bush's character. We have some idea what Bush means when he uses the word; he talks a lot about compassion, conservatism, credibility and his Christian awakening. In his address to the party faithful in Philadelphia he associated character with virtues such as abstinence, family love, courage, self-denial, responsibility, faith, idealism, charity, vision and equality. He let us know that the Founding Fathers were men of character, and that he believes men of character read the Bible. It's hard to find fault with his agenda of virtues.

It's also difficult to leap from Bush's recitation of moral abstractions to any obvious association with his actions as governor.

Bush's character campaign is as much about the immoral character of his opponent as about his own rectitude. No one begrudges Bush pointing out Gore's chameleon-like mutability, his claim of inventing the Internet, his hypocritical advocacy of campaign finance reform, his propensity to resort to Clinton-esque defenses ("no controlling legal authority") or his populist pretensions.

But our reservations about Gore do little to advance our understanding of Bush. How do we assess him?

It would be fair to question the courageousness of his evading service in Vietnam, or the forthrightness of his "non-denial" denial of alleged drug use as a youth. But by far the best-documented evidence of Bush's character can be found by examining how he has handled irrevocable decisions about life and death: his decisions to approve the executions by lethal injection of 145 men and women during the past five and a half years.

One needn't be Hamlet, driven insane by a sense of duty to avenge a heinous murder, to appreciate what an extraordinary burden deciding the fate of more than 140 individuals would impose on a human being. We know that jurors, who must confront real-life murderers in the flesh, are surprisingly reluctant to impose death sentences, are often traumatized by the ordeal and may agonize for days before making a decision. Yet the typical juror is only asked to take responsibility for the taking of a single human life. Imagine the responsibility of 145.

But if many jurors have qualms about taking another life, Bush has shown no such compunction. True, one could argue, and Bush does, that juries, appeals courts and his own Board of Pardons and Paroles have already examined the evidence and come to a conclusion about guilt in the cases he reviews. But there is an equally cogent argument that this makes the governor's clemency decisions even more onerous: Given the numerous demonstrable errors in capital convictions, how can one be sure that somewhere along the line something didn't go terribly wrong?

The question here is not Bush's support for the death penalty and his often-expressed belief that "capital punishment is a deterrent" that saves lives. It is whether or not Bush has respect both for human life and for the most basic prerequisites of justice. The question is one of his qualities of leadership and whether he has behaved responsibly when the consequences of his official actions were irredeemable.

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