Favorite son? Well, not everyone's

CRAWFORD, Texas — And you think the country is polarized?

The folks at Security Bank, the Yellow Rose and the Red Bull (souvenir shops, not bars), and the Fina filling station where farm elders commune over coffee at dawn in the "Room of Knowledge," are strongly for President Bush, the Republican favorite son whose ranch put tiny, alcohol-free Crawford on the world map.

Mayor Robert Campbell, a Democrat, is for Sen. John Kerry, which has not stopped him from trying to snare the Bush papers for nearby Baylor University when the president leaves office — in January, Campbell hopes. A local weekly newspaper, The Lone Star Iconoclast, has also declared for the Democratic challenger, paying a steep price in canceled subscriptions and hate mail.

The Crawford Peace House across the tracks — well, it is officially nonpartisan but it is hardly partial to the commander in chief of the war in Iraq.

For a quiet country crossroads (population 735) near Waco, the place billing itself as "the hometown of our 43rd president" is not immune from the scorched earth politics roiling the nation. "What we did was like slapping their mother," said Nathan Diebenow, one of four — uh, make that three — staff writers on The Iconoclast whose collaborative Sept. 29 editorial, "Kerry Will Restore American Dignity," set off a furor here, quickly crashing the newspaper's Web site (iconoclast-texas.com) with 6,496 hits, far more than the normal 250 a day. "The more reasons we gave," Diebenow said, "the worse it was." A fourth staff member listed on the masthead, David Anderson, associate editor, has dissociated himself from the editorial, said Michael Harvey, spokesman for the editor in chief, W. Leon Smith.

The newspaper, which endorsed Bush in 2000, faulted him for "a hidden agenda" that it said included emptying the Social Security trust fund, cutting Medicare, veterans benefits and military pay and involving the country in "a deadly and highly questionable war."

"He let us down," the newspaper said.

Smith, the Iconoclast's snowy-bearded majority owner and fervid Ronald Reagan admirer, said in his cluttered office in nearby Clifton that all three of the newspaper's outlets in Crawford had stopped selling it and that a reader's boycott had cut newsstand and subscription sales to 482 copies a week from 920.