"it will be the worst mistake you ever made ... "

The man who greeted me at the door was grey-haired, older, wearing a hunting cap. I was looking for his son. "He’s not here," he said, as he came out on to the porch, shutting the door behind him. “He, my wife, myself, my entire family, we’re all voting for McCain.”
“Okay,” I said, as a turned to leave, “thank you anyway.”
“It will be the worst mistake you ever made,” he said, “if you elect Obama president. You think the jobless numbers are bad now, you’ll see how bad they can get with his tax plan.”
I smiled and gestured, starting to say, in as polite a way as possible, that we’d have to disagree.

“Never mind the guns,” he said, following me down the porch steps. “He’s going to take them all away from us.”

He spoke softly, politely, calmly.

I said that that wasn’t true. He just wants more controls on guns, he doesn’t want sawn off shotguns to get in to the hands of inner city kids.

“He’s lying through his teeth,” he said, getting a little bit more animated. And he started to talk about a time when you couldn’t move a gun from one room to another without breaking the law.

I said that Barack Obama had no intention of going back to a time like that.

He pulled out a photocopy of an article from his back pocket. It’s written by John Sigler, President of the NRA, in the magazine, “American Hunter,” from June 2008.

“Read this,” he said. “Read it carefully.”

We had been talking now for about 5 minutes, much longer than I should talk to someone who’s clearly not going to change his mind.

I said that I would have to go, but thank you for the conversation and made my way down the path.

He started to roll up the American Flag, which had been flying from a flagpole stuck in to the flowerbed outside his house.

“I’m going to keep flying this flag,” he called out after me. “He’ll take it down.”

“No he won’t,” I called back to him. “I promise you, he won’t.”

“Yes he will,” the man said. “You’ll see.”