Red America, Blue America.

This is an article that presents reflections from Bob Levin on the political race for the United States Presidency. I was a college student in the American Midwest, a Philadelphia kid plunked down in the storied heartland. I loved it, too: the vast flat fields of corn and soybeans, the huge sky over the grain elevators and truck-stop signs, the county-seat squares with their imposing courthouses and the tidy wood or brick homes flying their Stars and Stripes. I loved swimming in old quarries or farm ponds with rope swings, and catching the cornball parades that were so much sweeter here in the real America. Venturing off-campus felt like a foray into hostile territory. To them Bush is a lying, simplistic, dangerous ideologue who twisted intelligence (and alienated allies) to send U.S. troops on a senseless march to Baghdad--who stoked terrorism, not smothered it--and who has run up record deficits while submitting phony budgets that pretend Afghanistan and Iraq don't exist.