Stanardsville, Va. — A harvest moon is rising over the cornfields on the last night of the Greene County Fair, just hours before the carnival rides are packed up and the local politicos break down the vast GOP tent, where yard signs and balloons are being handed out, and the much smaller Democratic Party tent, where you can shake hands with the local congressional candidate.

Then again, that the Democrats even have a tent at the fair this year is a step up for them in a county that went two-to-one for George W. Bush in 2004: “This is big doin’s for the Democrats in this county,” says their competition, Republican Party Chair Gary Lowe, who wound up helping his partisan adversaries put up their tent, because they’d never done it before. “Usually, they just have a little card table stuck off somewhere.”

Gary Lowe.

If you’re guessing that means this is a crowd that loves John McCain, guess again. Even Lowe, who’s flipping burgers for the South River Methodist Church tonight, assures me that’s not the case. “It’s not that people want McCain; it’s that they don’t want Obama.” Why is that? “Oh, [McCain's] liberal positions,” Lowe says. McCain “has switched — some people would say flip-flopped — on immigration, and he’s been a little soft on the judicial” appointments, too. “But,” Lowe says, heaving a sigh, “now he’s said … he’s going to be a conservative.” Asked if he believes those campaign-trail promises, Lowe doesn’t overstate his level of confidence: “I’m going to have to believe him.”

Still, Lowe’s analysis doesn’t offer much hope for Democrats who want to turn Virginia’a 13 electoral votes blue for the first time since 1964. There is a candidate who is unifying the county’s Republicans, Lowe says, and that’s Barack Obama. “They’re afraid of him, to be honest with you. Where’d he come from?”

On the issues, Lowe sees the price of gas working to his party’s advantage, “because Republicans, of course, are, ‘Drill here, drill now, drill ANWR.’” Immigration is another major focus: “A lot of people are irritated about this immigration; my wife is from England and it took two years for her to get here legally, so it burns her up to hear about these Mexicans coming here.”

Shelly Ripa with her daughters Faith, 12, and Kelsey, 14.

Shelly Ripa, a volunteer who’s handing out balloons in the Republican Party tent, is equally honest about her depth of feeling for the candidate she’s campaigning for: “McCain, as a Republican, we’re not too thrilled with him; he jumps the fence a little too much out of the comfort zone. You don’t want to be too nice and give conservative values away.” But, she says, “We’ll hold our nose and vote for him, because with the fight on terror, John McCain will be right there, where with Obama, who knows? People who come by here say, ‘Ah, we wish we had somebody better, but the alternative…’”

Ethyle Cole Giuseppe, who is sitting nearby listening to a bluegrass concert, says she’s not sure she’ll even vote this time, for the first time in her adult life. “McCain is over the hill,” says Giuseppe, who’ll soon be 90 herself. When I ask if she knows any Obama supporters, she mentions the Sunday school teacher at her church. “He’d vote for anyone — black, or anyone — as long as he was a Democrat.” Not that she hasn’t swung that way a time or two herself, she adds, most recently when she voted for John F. Kennedy. “My husband was Catholic,” she says, laughing.

As I wander around the fairgrounds, sidling up to folks in line for the Ferris wheel and the funnel cake stand, I never find an enthusiastic McCainiac. “I don’t like Obama; I don’t think he can take us in a better direction or keep all his promises,” says Kelly Wheeler, who’s carrying the inflatable plastic red, white, and blue guitar her daughter won — and counting the days until school starts.

Michelle Collier is wearing a “Perriello for Congress” button that was just given to her by the Democratic candidate; she says she didn’t want to hurt his feelings when he handed it to her. “I am in such a frenzy over who to vote for” for president, she says. “I don’t have a clue.” She usually votes Republican, she says, “on abortion and gay marriage and all that stuff. But I’m disappointed in McCain” over “all the mud-slinging back and forth; I’m not much on that. My husband says, ‘Michelle, it’s part of politics,’ but I don’t think it has to be.”

Ada Withrow and small friend.

There are a few outspoken Democrats here at the fair, including Ada Withrow, a nurse who says she’s surprised how many of her colleagues “seem to be leaning Obama, too, on health-care issues.”

The young Democratic congressional candidate, Tom Perriello, an enviro who comes out of the nonprofit world, is shaking every hand he can, alongside his mom Linda and dad Vito, a local pediatrician. In the race for the 5th-district seat once held by Thomas Jefferson, Perriello is trailing the 12-year incumbent, Virgil Goode, a former Democrat best known nationally for his support for tobacco interests. Goode once argued that he didn’t want his elderly mom “denied the one last pleasure” of a smoke on her hospital death bed. Two years ago, Goode famously criticized Michigan Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, for using a Koran at an unofficial swearing-in ceremony, warning that “if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office.”

Democratic congressional candidate Tom Perriello with his parents, Linda and Vito.

Perriello — a graduate of Yale Law who did service work in Liberia and Sierra Leone and worked as a national security analyst in Darfur and Afghanistan — is running hard on energy and environmental issues. He sees a lot of interest in the local-food movement from former tobacco farmers “who got the buyout and are looking for their next crop.” And interest in energy issues is big: “The main thing I say now is, ‘Do you know the No. 1 reason gas is going down is because people are driving less?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, and the thing that makes me furious is my pickup truck gets 13 miles a gallon because it’s cheaper to buy a politician than to build me a truck that’s more fuel-efficient.’ Even very Republican people nod when you say it’s the American people that are getting it done — they say, ‘I haven’t driven my truck in a week,’ so people already know it.”

Energy was the major focus of a recent Goode-Perriello debate. Says Perriello, “His answer on everything was drill in ANWR; if you asked him about the situation in Georgia, he was like, ‘We should probably drill in ANWR.’” According to the Lynchburg News & Advance, “Perriello accused Goode of voting consistently for legislation that increased the profits of oil companies, and said Goode had $200,000 of investments in energy stocks. Perriello said energy is America’s ‘No. 1 national security threat, No. 1 environmental threat, and No. 1 economic opportunity because entrepreneurs will be seeking capital for energy companies for the next 20 years.’

“Goode replied that his energy policy is ‘pro-drill, pro-conservative, and pro-alternative energy.’ Goode said he has voted for solar-energy bills, wind-energy bills, and biofuels. Boos erupted, apparently from Perriello supporters, when Goode said he favored drilling for oil in ANWR, the [Arctic] National Wildlife Refuge … Undaunted, Goode said at least three more times that he favored a pro-drill policy of searching for oil in the United States and offshore.”

If Perriello and Obama have any chance of winning in Virginia, it’ll be on the coattails of their party’s Senate candidate. Mark Warner, the former governor who came close to running for president this year, is heavily favored to win the Senate seat being vacated by Republican John Warner. Mark Warner’s recipe for winning in this conservative state? Hewing solidly to the center, avoiding the controversial social issues that have hurt Democrats throughout the South, and pushing a generally pro-business economic agenda, as reflected in Warner’s less-than-radical energy plan.

(Read Henneberger’s first post on Virginia.)

Reston Town Center.

Reston, Va. — If Virginia were a person, it would look a lot like Rod Markham, a federal contractor, retired from the Army, who’s leaning ever so slightly toward Obama but is still of two minds about the presidential race. “There’s a part of me that wants so bad to go for Obama,” he says, “and another part that says play it safe and go for McCain.”

The part of Virginia that wants to go Obama is here in the northern tier that includes the Washington suburbs and the booming Dulles Technology Corridor, which has replaced downtown D.C. as the region’s business center. So diverse is the area that some 100 languages are spoken at home by kids in Fairfax County public schools. The last Democrat who won this state in a presidential contest was LBJ, but Virginia’s demographics are changing so quickly that the question this year is whether Obama will win big enough in the north to offset support for McCain in the state’s much more conservative south and southwest. Turnout, especially among new voters, is expected to decide the outcome, along with swing voters like Markham, a centrist who expects to be arguing with himself right up to Election Day.

The fact that McCain was held in captivity for five and a half years in Hanoi guarantees Markham’s respect but not his vote: “Being a POW is traumatic,” so he wonders, “Is he clear and consistent in his thinking? I hope the boy is solid, but at 70, 71 …” he says, trailing off. He adds that a lot of his military buddies “want to make sure [McCain's] mind is clear. He’s a tough guy, he’s served his country and paid his dues — he’s John McCain — but that merits a closer look. The big question in this race is, is he competent?”

His questions about Obama are just the opposite: “His lack of experience may hurt him, and his race — to some people, that’s something they can’t get past. Are we ready? That will be part of the equation. But on the flip side of that inexperience is vigor and new ideas and change” — on energy policy, among other things. Markham agrees with Obama that “you can’t drill yourself out of this mess; you’ve got to rethink how you live.”

With John Edwards’ admission that he had an affair all over the news, Markham mentions the candidates’ private lives as one unknown that could make his mind up for him: “They do seem to both be moral people, though is what you think you know about John McCain true? And could Obama be in that church he was in and not have it rub off?”

I meet Markham in Reston Town Center, where there’s a farmers market on Thursday evenings and concerts on Saturdays. Reston was founded in 1964, as part of the “new community” movement that was a forerunner of smart growth. Though you still have to take a bus to get between here and the closest D.C. Metro line, the Town Center does have an unusual amount of street life. On a weekday afternoon, people are sitting by the fountain and in outdoor cafes, reading or having coffee or, in Markham’s case, a cup of chocolate ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s down the street.

Paul Patton.

Across the square, Paul Patton and his bike are taking a little break. He’s a musician, originally from Pennsylvania, and is volunteering part-time for Obama, the first candidate who’s ever moved him to do that. Last week, they had him working a phone bank one night over the dinner hour — an assignment he did not find easy. “I’m not really outgoing, but I was able to do it,” he said, despite the weirdness of trying to keep a total stranger on the line while reading from a script and being distracted by the noise of a dozen other people reading from the same script. Patton was won over long ago, after reading Obama’s two books, and hates that the knock against his candidate is that he’s an elitist: “Average guys aren’t supposed to become president!”

One measure of how important both campaigns consider Virginia is that both candidates have Virginians on the short list of possible vice presidential nominees, with Obama considering Gov. Tim Kaine and McCain looking at Richmond Rep. Eric Cantor.

But like others I talk to here, Patton’s not that excited about the possibility of Kaine as Obama’s running mate. “They’re friends and have a lot in common, but he hasn’t been governor that long,” says Patton. “He’s not my first choice.”

Sarah and Peter Shojaie and their daughter.

Sarah and Peter Shojaie, whose 22-month-old daughter is splashing in the fountain in the square, say voting Obama is a no-brainer for them, and they talk over each other when I ask why: “On the war, on the economy …” he says, while his wife sums up this way: “No more Republicans!”

But on energy issues, says Peter, “I don’t think either one of them has a good plan” — though he figures that Obama’s has to be better than McCain’s, because “the Republicans are more aligned with the oil industry.”

Environmental and transportation issues are huge here. With one of the worst traffic problems in the country, northern Virginia has been out of compliance with federal clean-air standards for nearly 20 years — the same length of time federal and state officials have been fighting over how to fund a light-rail system. Fairfax County is so covered with concrete that there’s nowhere for water to seep into the ground; tributaries of the Chesapeake River have become narrower over the years, so flooding is a chronic problem. The drains around Reston are marked with this reminder: “No Dumping. (¡No Contamine!) Drains to Sugarland Run.” Yet the Obama supporters I talk to say these are local issues they don’t expect any president to have any say in.

Stephanie Muldrow.

Stephanie Muldrow, a student at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, says that both environmental issues and gay rights are front and center for her. Last year, she joined a recycling club that makes sure bins are available everywhere on campus and an environmental action club that stays in contact with elected officials. She and her friends on campus are “all young and supporting Obama.”

Because Williamsburg is in the southern part of the state, and William & Mary is known as a pretty conservative school, I’m a little surprised to hear that, though she assures me that by Virginia standards, W&M is a liberal stronghold: “Now UVA, that’s conservative.”

So, is there anybody around here who’s voting McCain? Yes, but it’s not easy being in the political minority, and when I do happen on a couple of Republicans, they decline to give their names. When I ask the woman what issues she’s interested in, she replies, “Anything John McCain says. And that’s all I have to say.”

Nashua, N.H. — Suziana Moriera does not see soaring gas prices as all bad: “It’s still not hurting enough. People complain, but it’s got to hurt more” before Americans will start driving appreciably less. It’s got to hurt more, she thinks, before her hometown of Nashua will ever come up with public transportation that doesn’t involve “waiting an hour for a bus that still doesn’t take you where you need to go.”

That’s why Moriera, a music teacher and registered independent whose daughter makes her living as an environmental consultant, puts green issues near the very top on the list of concerns she’ll be voting on in November — right below getting the troops out of Iraq and putting the economy back on track after what she sees as the disaster of the Bush years. (“I’ve had enough of the Republicans!”) Yet she may well vote for John McCain for president, “even though he is in the Bush camp, and they have been terrible on the environment.” Why? Essentially, because she suspects Barack Obama of being a little bit too nice a guy, a possible pushover.

Though a lot of us do seem to want a president we’d enjoy grilling out with, the less-discussed fine print on the wish list is that we want him to be the kind of good-bud neighbor who is also capable of acting like a jerk sometimes — the dad next door who’d have no problem yelling at the kids in the party house to turn the music down, and no problem calling the cops.

“He’s very much a gentleman,” Moriera says of Obama — and not at all responsible for what she saw as the sexist treatment of her first-choice candidate, Hillary Clinton. But could he be too gentlemanly? She wonders: “Does he have the backbone to deal with the huge problems he’ll have to face?” So far, he has just not filled her with confidence on that score. “Obama has been flip-flopping so much, I’m not sure about him. On eavesdropping, I was shocked,” she says, referring to his recent Senate vote in support of the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Obama had promised he would help filibuster any FISA bill that gave immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. But then, he went ahead and voted for just such a bill. “And if he did that,” Moriera reasons, “he could do other things.” Come November, she may reluctantly conclude that what she sees as McCain’s strength is more important than his specific stands, many of which she disagrees with: “I’ll have to see.”

Like Moriera, whom I met outside the town’s City Hall, the whole state of New Hampshire is a toss-up in the presidential race. Though there is little support for either President Bush or the war in Iraq here, McCain is seen, as the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato puts it, as “New Hampshire’s kind of Republican.” It’s this state, after all, that “rescued McCain’s candidacy from oblivion in January” when he won the New Hampshire primary, just as he’d done in 2000.

But out in back of City Hall, an all-female group of town employees on break seems to be in agreement about the country’s biggest problem at the moment — it’s the economy — and which candidate they favor to fix it. “It’s Obama right now,” says Janet Durand. She’s the town’s DMV coordinator — and thus, she jokes, “the one nobody likes!” She holds it against McCain that one of his top economic advisers, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, said that the recession is all in our minds, and that we’ve become a country of whiners. “That stupid comment about whining” really cinched it, she says. “They’re too rich to know anything” about what average Americans go through.

Her friend Heidi Slosek, who works in the similarly popular tax collector’s office, says she likes McCain well enough as a person: “McCain is not as bad as some people are saying; he was a POW and that says a lot. It takes a lot to survive that and still be strong like he is. He’s for continuing us being in Iraq, and that worries me, but what would happen if we weren’t there? Would that mean more terrorism coming here?” Still, she’s decided to vote for Obama, too, “because he’s in the same ballpark as Hillary, and this time we do need a Democrat for president because we’ve had a rough two terms with a Republican.”

Though I’ve been to Nashua many times before, this is my first solo trip — the first time I haven’t been tagging along after a presidential candidate, hitting house parties and town hall meetings in the state where the country’s first presidential primary is held every four years. On all of those earlier trips, every man and woman I met on the street — this one, the town’s Main Street – had come to meet the candidate. So typically, he or she was an experienced comparative shopper of prospective presidents, with detailed knowledge and trick questions. This time, of course, that’s not the case. As I work my way down Main talking to people — panhandling for opinions, really — I’m reminded not only how often emotion trumps issues in the ballot box, but how unpredictably.

A young retail clerk in an all-organic clothing store, for instance, tells me that he supports McCain “because my friend’s parents want McCain.” Though he doesn’t want his name used, he is happy to chat — there’s not a customer in sight — and I ask if there’s anything about the Republican nominee himself that appeals to him. Nope, he says; it’s not McCain who has impressed him, but his friend’s father, whose opinion he values: “He’s a wicked hard-working guy who fixes up apartments.”

Nashua has twice been named the best place in the country to live by Money Magazine, and its downtown is lovely, if not terribly lively in this economy. The textile mills the town was built around have been turned into condos overlooking the Nashua River, which local activists have cleaned up considerably since the days when it was multi-colored from all the dye dumped into it.

Across the Main Street Bridge, Robert Guilmette is sitting in the parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts, having an iced coffee and taking a break from riding around on his new motorcycle. He is a maintenance worker who has lost two jobs in recent years when his employers went bankrupt. So his biggest issue is “being against jobs going overseas” — which would seem to put him more in line with Obama’s positions. Yet he, too, is voting for McCain. “He’s straightforward, and has experience, like they say on all the talk shows,” particularly Guilmette’s favorite, Hannity & Colmes on FOX News.

And Obama? “He wants to change too many things at once, and it’s not possible, so he couldn’t accomplish anything,” says Guilmette. Actually, he saw Obama in person when the candidate visited the local high school where Guilmette does maintenance work. “He was impressive, but he just seems like he’s got too many ideas, and wants too radical a change,” he says, and grins. “The principal played basketball with him, and he liked him.”

In a barbershop further down Main, the proprietor, Robert Roberge, is telling me about being a fifth-generation barber, still living in the house he grew up in, when an African-American kid runs in with a six-pack under his arm, and asks the price of a haircut. “Five dollars, but you can’t have that beer in here because you’re underage.” By 10 years, easy. “It’s not my beer,” the kid says. “It’s for my uncle. I’ll take it to him — he’s right over there — and I’ll be right back.” Sure you will, Roberge says as the kid dashes out. “I never saw a black person until I was 12 years old,” he tells me, and goes on to complain about how his hometown has since been “taken over” by minorities — Hispanics in particular — and homosexuals. (Six percent of the town’s 86,605 residents were Hispanic as of the last census, and 2 percent were black.)

Roberge considers himself an environmentalist — and knows a lot about dying coral reefs and alternative fuels — but he won’t be voting on those issues, or for that matter, voting at all. That’s a first for 57-year-old Roberge, who supported Kerry in ’04. But he’s had it with the Republicans, and would not even consider supporting Obama: “Like this black lady asked me when I was cutting her hair, where did he come from? A man who won’t pledge allegiance to the flag, who wants us all to speak Spanish? If even Jesse Jackson wants to cut his nuts off, what’s everybody else saying? I’m too old-school — an old redneck with red hair — to think a Muslim-based human being could be the proprietor of the Big House.”

We talk for some time, until a customer finally comes in. And it isn’t the kid with the beer.

One thing I learned traveling around the country a couple of years ago, talking to voters for a political book I was working on, is that Americans tend to give their elected officials a super-size helping of benefit of the doubt.

One night, I was in Suffolk, Va., having dinner with some active-duty Navy women — the real “security moms” — who were in between tours in the Persian Gulf. One of them, a young Republican named Elizabeth DeAngelo, remarked that the war in Iraq had had no effect on her political views, because she did not consider the decision to go to war a partisan matter. “Being in the military opens your eyes that it is dangerous out there,” said DeAngelo, who watched the first “shock and awe” bombs fall from the deck the U.S.S. Kearsarge, “and you have to believe that no president would want to run the government into the ground, for their legacy, if nothing else. So if a Democrat did get elected, I wouldn’t think, ‘Oh, no!’ I don’t know if the reasons if we went over there were the right reasons. But even though I didn’t like [President] Clinton as a person, I can’t believe — nobody, I think, would put several hundred thousand people in a conflict for oil. Even if it were Clinton, I wouldn’t think that. I think they do what they think is right.”

A number of people I spoke to across the country made that same point — that politics aside, no American president could possibly be that venal, or stoop so low as to put Americans in harm’s way over a mere commodity. Much of the rest of the world does not have this kind of confidence in the best intentions of its leaders, but we do. Which is why we’re still unsure about the “real reason” we went into Iraq. It’s why most reporters find it easier to believe we wandered into this misadventure as the result of some Oedipal psychodrama in the Bush family, or plain incompetence. And it’s why I had a really, really hard time hearing what Charlie Stephens had to tell me when I sat down with him in Portland, Ore., a couple of weeks ago.

Charlie Stephens.

Stephens, now a highly regarded independent energy consultant, is an old Navy man, too — a former commander — and for many years a senior policy analyst with Oregon’s Department of Energy. He came to meet me for coffee armed with graphs, charts, and a lifetime of study — all of it adding up to conclusions that even ardent Bush critics would find discomfiting.

We don’t just have an energy problem, Stephens began. “We have a “petrodollar problem.” He walked me through our oil-producing and consuming history, starting back in the ’60s, when the West’s major oil companies controlled 75 percent of the world’s oil, and our leading financial institutions “said that to buy oil you had to use dollars, so the [oil] revenue all went straight to Wall Street.” Today, not only is our oil consumption increasing and production declining, but our dollar is being undermined by the fact that oil deals are increasingly conducted in euros or yen. “That’s what the ‘axis of evil’ had in common,” Stephens said. “That was their real transgression, undermining the dollar. Saddam demanded that the [U.N.'s] food-for-oil be paid in euros, North Korea transferred its money out of dollars, and Iran is trading oil for yen and euros, not the dollar.”

So Stephens supports the theory that we went into Iraq over that provocation, “to gain control of the resources” in the country with the third-largest oil reserves in the world — Iran’s reserves rank second — while also guaranteeing that Iraq would be in no shape to consume its own product any time soon. “Dark” doesn’t begin to describe this scenario, and most Americans, myself included, are not eager to embrace it.

Stephens holds some glass-half-empty opinions the environmental community might not want to hear, either: That “we won’t see carbon sequestration for 20 years and clean coal and new technology are not going to save us,” and that “even renewables are too energy-intensive.” (His solution: close every coal plant as of yesterday, slash consumption by 80 percent pronto, and hope that the right people get elected “so that we’ll at least go to hell a little more slowly.”)

Yet since coming back from Oregon, I keep thinking about what Stephens said about “the kleptocrats running our government” and how “I’m not even sure they’re stealing [the oil] for us, for our country.”

I thought about his depressing views on the likelihood of another war over oil, in Iran, when I read the story headlined “Oil Cash May Prove a Shaky Crutch for Iran’s Ahmadinejad” on the front page of The Washington Post the other day.

I heard him buzzing gloomily in my ear again the very next morning — can’t a girl have her coffee in peace? — while reading another Post story, “Iraq Opens Oil Fields to Global Bidding.” (Nah, nobody would put several hundred thousand people in a conflict for oil.)

And on July 3, there he was once more when I saw this: “Bush administration officials told Hunt Oil last summer that they did not object to its efforts to reach an oil deal with the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, even while the State Department was publicly expressing concern … according to documents obtained by a House committee.” (Hunt as in Bush fundraiser Ray Hunt.)

And darned if I haven’t been thinking about Charlie’s glum views some more while finishing Upton Sinclair’s 1927 page-turner of a novel, Oil! — the “inspiration” for the movie There Will Be Blood, though the book is a whole ‘nother barrel of crude. It reminds readers how U.S. foreign policy crafted by campaign donors is nothing new, and how the oil barons bought themselves a president in Warren Harding, who may or may not have realized what his buddies in the oil business were up to. At one point in Oil!, the tycoon’s son remarks that he can’t bear to think we’d ever go to war to protect American business interests, and his conscience and best friend, a labor organizer, says, “So you don’t think about it, and that makes it easy for the business men to get it ready.”

Charlie, I will continue to hope you are wrong. But I don’t think we can continue to assume that is the case.

Photo: David Grant

Portland, Ore. – Oh, the indignity of tooling around environmentally aware Portland in a big-dog SUV, in between conversations about the environment. Even the guy at the rental-car counter was apologetic: “I know,” he said, when I gulped at the news that my economy car had been super-sized. “No one wants them, but we have to give them to somebody.”

Just as gay people grow up and move to San Francisco or New York, green people grow up and move here. Years before I began sorting bottles and cans on the other coast, my buddy who is a Kansan-turned-Oregonian was struggling to convey just how bad her new boss really was: “Melinda,” she finally told me, “he does not even recycle.”

My friend’s next-door neighbors are transplanted Texans, Linda d’Onofrio and Andrew Migliore, who as d’Onofrio says “came here for local produce and a forward way of thinking.” Even so, it took them a while to settle in with their chosen tribe: “I didn’t grow up around political correctness, and we had a hard time the first couple of years,” says d’Onofrio. “We’d say tasteless things about everybody’s race, religion, animals; we’d make kitty taco jokes” — not widely appreciated by “people who will stop you on the street and tell you what they think of your Hummer.” Now, though, this is home, and the whole moment is more subdued: “My sister’s a true Communist who goes around the world teaching micro-banking, my brother’s a true Fascist with his boots in the corner, and we used to have the best conversations, but all the fun has been sucked out of that. The conversation has stopped because it’s not funny anymore; you can’t make jokes about Abu Ghraib and melting ice caps.”

One thing d’Onofrio and Migliore still don’t take too seriously is the idea that John McCain has any prayer of being elected president. “Unless they rig every machine in three or four states, no Republican is going to win,” says d’Onofrio, who is a speech pathologist. “I always had a soft spot for McCain,” offers Migliore, an entrepreneur with an engineering background. “The Republican Howard Dean!” his wife adds. But that was before he contradicted himself on torture and started weaving all over the road on global climate change: “He reverses himself every three or four days, on energy and everything else,” d’Onofrio says, “so my gut on him is he doesn’t even know his own policy.”

Somewhere in Portland, there must be people who are pulling for the presumptive Republican nominee. But in the 97212 zip code, where Obama yard signs bloom alongside drought-resistant native plants, McCain fans are keeping it on the down-low. (“Are the McCain signs even out yet?” my friend here wonders.)

Unlike 18-year-old Thomas Scharff, who still cannot believe his good fortune, getting to vote for Barack Obama in his very first electoral at bat: “I couldn’t ask for somebody who more inspires me, and there’s both an intellectual and an emotional aspect to it.”

While I’m thinking, “Whoa, this kid is so articulate, I guess organic food does make you smart,” Scharff is still speeding on down the road: “I’m impressed that McCain has moved away from Bush on cap-and-trade, but he’s sold out on offshore drilling, and Obama has stronger and more aggressive plans on global warming and could take moral leadership on the global stage instead of playing with gimmicks like the gas tax, and he’s willing to go after windfall profits.”

Scharff was not among the record crowd of 75,000 who showed up for an Obama rally here in May. But he’d already heard the candidate speak at another local event in March, along with some friends from his school’s “con team,” which competes in demonstrating an understanding of the U.S. Constitution. “When Obama talked about restoring habeas corpus, we were jumping up and down,” he says.

Another neighbor, Jackie Ellenz, was first on the block to rip out her lawn and replace it with fireweed and chrysanthemums, which require less water. She has to admit she’s relieved when I ‘fess up that that’s my white SUV over there; she’d been suspecting it belonged to the girl dating my friend’s teenaged son. “I thought it might have been Luke’s little girlfriend’s,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I would hate to be Luke.’” Ellenz, who is a retired teacher, moved here from Wisconsin 20 years ago with her husband, Steve Snyder, and they, too, award McCain at least one star for outshining the current president. “I’d never vote for him and his proposals are weak, but it’s a hopeful sign that he’s not a global-warming denier,” Snyder says.

He and his wife also share a cautious, my-heart-has-been-broken-before attitude about their own candidate. “I’ll be curious to see how distant Obama can stay from oil and gas” lobbies, Ellenz says. Yet they do like that he seems to know he can’t accomplish anything without what Snyder calls “a movement underneath him” — to help figure out, for starters, how people who can’t afford solar panels and new insulation can become carbon neutral too. Because for all the pride they take in reusing baggies, Oregonians don’t want to live on a little green island. “We want to be the furthest behind,” Snyder says.

When I hit up members of the Thistles, a rec-league women’s soccer team, for their political opinions, there is more disagreement about how long they’ve been playing together (20-plus years, in any case) than about the presidential race. Not one Thistle is even considering voting for McCain. “I’m not sure Obama’s green policies are the strength of his vision,” says Andrea Karpinski, “but every ounce of his being is hearing people say we want something different.” And what I’m hearing people here say is that they’re also terribly curious about the particulars.

Charlie Stephens, a former Navy commander and energy consultant who is retired from Oregon’s Department of Energy, says he has yet to meet the politician brave enough to say this one, super-scary word: less. As in, we need to consume less, make less, and throw away less, lots less. Because even if we open our offshore areas to drilling, we’d burn through those reserves in about four years. Says Stephens, “My question is: Then what?”

Dave Chen, a venture capitalist whose firm invests in companies engaged in various areas of sustainability, has some thoughts about that. He never saw the current administration as an ally: “The Bush administration is not pro-business; it’s pro-friends. The most competitive industry in the world is high-tech,” the industry Chen comes out of. “We beat ourselves silly to give you more for less every year — better and more powerful and cheaper. If you were pro-business, you’d realize that America is in a knife fight with China and India. Instead, we haven’t even thought about our foundational competitiveness” against countries that would sacrifice almost anything to provide their young people with a better education.

“Instead, we’re chasing goblins and losing competitiveness” while failing to recognize that the future of the economy is in green jobs, Chen says. But both McCain and Obama, he feels, “are still formulating their policies, and neither has connected the dots or had an ‘a ha’ moment about why this is so core, why this is a mandate for the future. Change only happens when you embrace it emotionally, and you can’t fake that.”

Charleston, W.Va. — According to the exit polls, I was hanging out with a bunch of racially challenged Hillary supporters at last night’s victory party here.

One in five West Virginia voters fessed up that race was an important factor in their choice of a candidate –- and they didn’t mean they saw Obama’s diverse heritage as a positive. How do we know that? Because of those who walked right up to pollsters and said out loud that race was the elephant in their donkey-party living room, 81 percent voted for Clinton. Not only that, but 7 percent of West Virginia voters went for John Edwards –- who ended his run decades ago, as measured in political time –- but was the only white dude still on the ballot. What does that tell us? Nothing we want to hear.

Yet right up until Election Day in November, nothing that can’t be mitigated, either. I say that because after the ’04 election, I spent 18 months roaming around 20 states, listening to women across the political spectrum rant and rave about Hillary Clinton: Never, ever, they said. And who are her biggest supporters now? The skepticism I heard from them didn’t seem to have much to do with gender, so maybe it isn’t the same thing. But last night, as I was listening to West Virginians vowing that they would never, ever settle for Obama, I couldn’t help wondering how long “never” would last this time.

In part, that depends on the preferred candidate of “hard-working Americans, white Americans.” Though it’s true that Clinton has been invited to exit the stage, the issue isn’t whether or not she quits the race, but whether or not she quits the race baiting. I know a whole wing of the Democratic Party thinks it horribly unfair to conclude that some of her campaign’s statements add up to that — “He’s not a Muslim … as far as I know,” plus likening Obama to Jesse Jackson, and “He would not have been my pastor,” and “one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use,” and the shout-out to “hard-working Americans, white Americans” — but then, this is a campaign that’s been saying for months it doesn’t believe in math, anyway. (As a woman sitting near me at Hillary’s victory party said, when she saw her candidate’s lead narrowing even slightly, “Numbers lie.”)

Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called Hillary the “understudy” candidate, hoping the star comes down with the flu. So if she’s Eve Harrington, does that make Bill her Addison DeWitt? And remember sweet, naïve Karen Richards, the Celeste Holm character who engineers Margo Channing’s failure to show up on opening night because she can’t believe Eve means any real harm? Sometimes, seeing no evil leads to no good.

Huntington, W.Va. — Door-knocking for Barack Obama in a state where he expects to get stomped today has been kind of thankless for Pam Wonnell, a nurse and old friend of mine who moved here from Illinois last year for her husband’s job in coal mining: “I am not feeling the love” while phone canvassing or standing on front porches watching the people inside pretend not to be home. “But I’m not quitting, ’cause I’m a fighter, like Hillary,” she says, and laughs at her own joke. “Isn’t that Hillary-ous?”

Canvassing with her in her hilly, aerobically “butt-busting” neighborhood on the eve of the Democratic primary, though, one surprise is the can’t-wait-for-November enthusiasm for Obama among … Republicans? Hmm. Another is that even — or perhaps especially — in this coal-mining state, where billboards along I-64 scream, “Yes, Coal” and “Coal Keeps the Lights On,” voters say they want to hear candidates talk more about the environment, not less.

Carolyn Jarrell, for instance, is a retired teacher’s aide whose late husband ran a juvenile detention center; their family lived over the store and “nobody ever wanted to come and play” with their kids. She’s a registered Republican who is not in love with any of her presidential choices — “I don’t know that there’s anybody on the ballot I can’t live without” — yet she’s leaning toward Obama in the fall. “I just think he has it more than the other two,” Clinton or McCain, she says. Given that Jarrell sees universal health care as “socialized medicine” and worries more than anything about violent crime, that seems to come literally out of left field. Until, that is, she details what it is she’s waiting to hear from her (slightly) preferred candidate: “I’d like to hear Obama say, ‘Carolyn, I’m going to clean up your environment and stop this mountaintop mining and get your streams nice and clear and give you another tax rebate.’” Nah, just kidding about the tax rebate, she adds, laughing. “That was so silly.”

Only having said all that, now Jarrell is worried that she may have offended her new neighbor, because she knows Wonnell’s husband works in coal mining. “I hope I’m not stepping on your toes,” she says, “but that mountaintop removal has been such a detriment to our state.” Not at all, Wonnell says, hastening to assure her that she couldn’t agree more: “It’s OK, Carolyn. My husband does not do mountaintop.” They also agree that plain old litter is a big problem.

Another neighbor, Gloria Pauley, whose husband is a college professor at Marshall University — yes, the one from We Are Marshall — suggests that’s because it’s not easy being green in West Virginia. In their neighborhood, she says, some people dump because trash pickup costs extra, and recycling pickup costs even more. “We used to do little things, like recycle, but they took away the boxes,” and kept making it more expensive. Wonnell tells Pauley that she finally canceled her recycling service after her husband saw the trash collectors picking it up one morning — and throwing it in with the rest of the garbage.

Though Pauley is also a Republican, she’s disenchanted with her party, over the war and the economy, and shocked to find herself really taking a shine to Hillary Clinton. “Right now I feel very sorry for Hillary, being abandoned by everyone,” she says, “and this is a woman I couldn’t stand when she was in the White House, but I actually think she might make a good president.” And her Democratic rival? Not so much: “When I saw Obama had called his grandparents ‘typical white folks,’ what is that? It would be exciting to have a woman president — and it would be OK to have a black person, too,” she adds.

But what’s top on her list of concerns as a voter is “the man across the street just lost his car — the other day the son stopped by and said, ‘Can you buy me some dog food?’ — and the people over here lost their home, and they both work! I’ve never known anybody that lost their home or their car.” This summer, she and her husband will be leaving their RV parked in the driveway, and she is not happy about that, either: “Two people who’ve worked hard all their lives? I’m not going to have an oceanfront home, but a little Winnebago tooling around shouldn’t be too much to ask.”

For candidates — or pollsters, or anyone who makes a living trying to figure out voters — the wisps of smoke that electoral decisions sometimes turn on can seem frustratingly difficult to figure. Melanie Adkins, who has been refinishing furniture all day and apologizes for answering the door in her “Well, aren’t we just a freakin’ ray of sunshine?” T-shirt, says she’s voting Hillary because she just heard on the news that Clinton had spent more time in her state. Joe Cameron says he’s a “straight Democrat” who has been warned by his coworkers in asbestos removal that Obama will raise taxes, and “is not the man for the job.”

But the through line of these conversations is not so different from the narrative of the election as a whole: “Obama just seems honest,” because he panders less than the other candidates, says Kareem Ahmed, a 20-year-old first-time voter. When Wonnell seconds that emotion — “Oh, good!” — he says, “It’s not just good; it’s virtually nonexistent.”

Deborah Navy, a teacher who has voted Republican since “the early Reagan days,” says she can’t wait to switch parties come November: “Obama is fresh and idealistic and a Bobby Kennedy type; I trust his judgment.”