CAMDEN – Brad Rourke and Dale Lawson have worked in politics for years, and they believe most politicians will take the high road to getting elected – at least under the right circumstances.

Yet national polls, including one designed by Rourke and Lawson, show most people believe politicians will lie to further their careers, and are unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

Who is seeing reality?

Rourke and Lawson, who work for the Camden-based Institute for Global Ethics, a nonprofit center founded in 1990 by former journalist Rushworth Kidder, believe they have found the right circumstances to ensure fair, clean election battles. The Pew Charitable Trusts agreed, giving the institute a $795,000 grant to create those circumstances in about 60 races around the country this year.

One of those races is in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.

The institute has created a code of conduct that bans smear tactics and misleading advertisements, among other things, which candidates voluntarily pledge to follow.

The institute’s work on fair campaign practices actually began in 1996 in Maine.

It was the first congressional election after the so-called Republican Revolution, said Rourke, who is the institute’s vice president for public policy, and the atmosphere was rife with nastiness.

“It was the first year that soft money started being a big factor,” said Lawson, who is project director of the campaign initiative.

“The level of vitriol was shocking to many,” Rourke said.

Working with the Margaret Chase Smith Library and the Smith Public Policy Center, the institute created a code of ethics and presented it to candidates on the ballot for federal office in Maine. All 11 candidates signed the code.

Rourke said the institute was so pleased with the results of the voluntary code that it approached the Pew organization and asked if it would fund replicating the model on a larger scale. Pew agreed, and directed the institute to try it in two larger states.

With the grant, the institute took on federal and statewide races in Ohio and Washington in the 1998 election.

“We were successful,” Rourke said, convincing candidates in more than 75 percent of the races to sign the code.

According to IRS rules, the institute can not disclose if, for example, one candidate refuses to sign while the other agrees to sign. Instead, the institute announces when it is able to persuade all the candidates in a particular race to sign the code.

“As soon as all the candidates have signed, we have a press conference,” Lawson said, and the contents of the code are made public.

Candidates willingly embrace the rules, the men say, in part because it gets them off the hook of having to mix it up with their opponents on a more sordid level.

“What it does is actually open up a space where you can criticize your opponent without being criticized for ‘going negative,'” Rourke said.

The code draws boundaries, but does not take the teeth out of a political fight.

“It doesn’t turn football into ballet,” Lawson said, but rather lets candidates “fight fair.”

Just where the “fair” boundary lies is part of the debate. Does exposing George W. Bush’s OUI conviction fall within the code? Or reminding voters about former President Clinton’s sexual affair?

The codes tend to be general, so the answer is not clear-cut, they say. If Al Gore announced the discovery of Bush’s OUI record, it would be seen as accurate, but Rourke and Lawson believe because it happened so long ago, it might not be viewed as fair.

A key component of most of the codes is forbidding third parties from maligning an opponent on behalf of a candidate. If, for example, a pro-life group sends out a bulk mailing claiming a candidate is a baby killer, the opponent is expected to publicly disavow that tactic.

If, in the course of a campaign, a candidate breaks the code, the institute is not allowed to point out infractions.

In the early stages, critics said the code was toothless because of the lack of recourse by the institute, but Rourke and Lawson disagree.

“The system really places the power in the hands of the voters and the media,” said Lawson. Voters can send letters to the editor pointing out violations, or contact the candidates directly.

“It can actually change the tenor of a race in a dramatic way,” Rourke said.

“We believe in politics,” Lawson said. “Most of the people I know who run for office, they’re great people.”

The code allows politicians to take the high road, they said.

More information about the project is at: www.globalethics.org.