With five grown daughters and ten grandchildren between them, he and Eileen “maintain a strong sense of spirituality,” says Wes. “I just don’t think you have to go around telling everyone about it.” Religious beliefs were simply not a political issue, said Eileen, a strong supporter of stem-cell research (“Nancy Reagan, you go, girl”). It was in the middle of this conversation that Eileen, who has been known to enjoy an episode of South Park, announced she was about to use “the dreaded M-word.”

“Not the dreaded M-word,” Wes exclaimed in mock horror. “Rush says there’s no such thing as a moderate Republican.”

“Oh yeah?” replied Eileen. “Just try me.”

What it came down to, said Wes, was “we may be Republicans, but we’re not nuts.”

“Going to New York is kind of like a nightmare that became a dream,” said Wes, who once thought of the city as “this place where people closed their windows while women called for help in the alleyway.” Now Wes, an admirer of Giuliani-style policing, ran his finger with gleeful expectation along the orange path of the D train on the subway map I’d brought to Zephyr Cove. Just that morning, the UPS man had arrived with the “official welcoming packet” from the RNC. Several letters beginning with “Dear Delegate” offered entertainment choices including Broadway plays. Mostly, though, aside from eating “some really good corned-beef sandwiches,” the Rices were most looking forward to taking part in the nomination of George Bush.

“You want to know why I like George Bush?” Wes Rice asked me as we puffed on sweet Jamaican cigars in the crisp, piney air outside his house.

“Last month, he was in Reno. We got onstage. It was such a thrill to be 25 feet from a sitting president. I was able to make eye contact with him. He seemed very genuine. I felt he would never knowingly lie to me. Maybe it is a cop thing. On the street, you’ve got to trust your assessments of people or you could be in serious trouble. I trust myself on George W. Bush.”

Like a moron, I’d left the lights on in my rental car. We were charging the battery, using Wes’s Cherokee. Cigars and jumper cables, these were “man things,” said Eileen. She was going to bed. It had been a big day, driving around the lake, checking out Emerald Bay, stopping by the Coast Guard station where the chief officer reported how they’d picked up “a man of Middle Eastern descent behind our HAZMAT shack.” It turned out to be a false alarm, but you couldn’t be too careful, even 6,000 feet up, in such beautiful country.

“No need to go to heaven,” said Wes, expressing his fealty to the great lake. “We’re already in paradise.” But it was a paradise with a dark side, said Wes, relating how Ed Callahan, his patrol-boat partner, fell overboard in a storm and drowned on Memorial Day weekend in 1998.

“The water was 44 degrees,” Wes recalled. “You can’t last long; the hypothermia shuts you down. I tried to save him, but it was impossible. I was passed out when they dragged me back into the boat.”

It was a sad, rueful tale, how Ed Callahan, who made it through several tours of duty in Vietnam, came to die in the seductively blue waters of Lake Tahoe, where college students came on weekends to shatter the silence in their Ski-doos. It was the sort of story men sometimes tell when they’re trying to get through to each other, nodding at the ineffableness of it all. In another time and place, Wes and I, similar in age, laughing at some of the same things, could have been friends.

Too bad we had to talk about politics. Wes had warned against it. “I’m not going to change your mind, and you’re not going to change mine.” But I’d come 2,800 miles because he and Eileen were Republican delegates, so what else were we supposed to talk about? I couldn’t figure how Wes, who seemed like such a smart, soulful guy, could look in the eyes of George W. Bush, orbs I found beady and vacant, and decide this was a man he could trust.

“If there is anything that really turns my stomach, it is a liberal man,” said Rick Gue. I looked to see if he was staring at me.

A lot of things Wes said didn’t make sense to me. He said, “I know those weapons of mass destruction are there. They are there, or in Syria, and they will be found.” He said, “John Kerry represents everything I hate. Who knows how many American lives people like him and Jane Fonda cost us protesting the Vietnam war?” He said whatever happened in the 2000 Florida vote count was worth it, because, as he said his Democratic friends agreed, “heaven help us if Al Gore was the president on September 11, 2001.”

Then again, Sheri Valera nodded when one of her friends from Riverbend said, “Kerry’s war record is a lie. Bush was training to go over there, and if they called him, you can bet he would have been a better soldier than Kerry.” Even Eileen Rice, so flinty under fire, said, “You’ve got to have faith that the government knows more than we do and is doing the right thing.”

These were the views of the very nice people I had set out to welcome to New York. Wes Rice was correct. It would have been better if we didn’t talk about politics.

It was a matter of what version of America you believed in, I thought, driving along the banks of the Ohio, great heartland river of flatboats, murder ballads, and shuttered Appalachian factories. I like my America big, a sea-to-shining-sea big, a boiling regionalized stewpot, freaky off-angles seeping between the corporate cracks. I deplored the idea that the city should secede from the country. My America is not complete without both Joey Ramone and George Jones, to say nothing of Dr. Dre, Emerson, and Randy Weaver. How could New York be its own nation? It didn’t even have one truck stop. My America needed America.

When the RNC gave me its list of delegates, they kept referring to my final interviewee, the auditor and tax assessor of Lawrence County, Ohio, as “Moose.”

“What’s his real name?” I inquired. I didn’t want to call up and just ask for Moose.

“Ray,” they said. “Ray Dutey. But everyone calls him Moose.”

“His name is Moose Dutey?”

“That’s his name.”

And there it was, RAY T. DUTEY, AUDITOR, on three different wooden signs outside his second-floor office in the Gothic Lawrence County courthouse in downtown Ironton, once the center of the Southern Ohio pig-iron empire but now one more mining town hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Resplendent in a beige suit with boldly matching gold tie, Moose bounded out of his oversize chair to greet me. No way he’s more than five-foot-four. Smiling, Moose said, “I guess now you know why they call me Moose.”

If all politics is local, then Moose Dutey, who grew up playing on the river sandbars, was politics itself. Recently turned 74, one of ten siblings, Moose has been in Lawrence County public life for 55 years, starting as a councilman in his native Coal Grove, about three miles east on U.S. 52. In 1960, he was elected mayor of Coal Grove (“won by 146 votes,” Moose recalls), and was reelected in 1962, during which time he managed to raise enough money to replace the fire truck the town had been using since 1936. In 1964, he was elected county recorder and moved to the courthouse in Ironton, where he’s worked ever since.

Never beaten in an election, Moose is chairman of the Lawrence Country Republican Party. On his 50th year of public service, the county threw him a parade. They renamed his street, so now he lives at 200 Dutey Drive. He could run for another term in 2006, but he figures he’s done. “I’m going to retire,” Moose said.

Of course, Moose Dutey has never been to New York. Outside of when he was sent overseas in the Korean War and stopped in San Francisco, Moose said, “I haven’t been around the country that much.” He hardly even goes to Kentucky, though the state, right across the river, is visible from his office window. When he does cross the bridge, it’s usually to eat at Applebee’s or Ruby Tuesday’s. Ironton, a shrinking town of 12,000, where a quarter in the parking meter buys you five hours, and the sign in the pool-hall window says FIGHTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, doesn’t have “a single decent restaurant that you’d want to eat in.”