Utah town Bush's No. 1 supporter

RANDOLPH — To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive-Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt.

"Patty melts! No one makes patty melts anymore," she is saying to the counterman, Ryan Louderman, who knew she was not local as soon as he heard the sound of a car being locked. "Can I get it without onions?" she says. "And can I get mustard? On the side? Dijon mustard?"

"I don't think we have Dijon mustard," says Louderman, who is 15 and would have voted for Bush if he could have. "I think we only have regular mustard." But he writes it down anyway and gives the order to Pat Orton, the owner and cook.

"No onions? With mustard?" Orton, who voted for Bush in 2004 and 2000, says. "We get some weird ones" — but she cooks it as requested, and passes the non-patty melt out to the woman, who takes a bite, declares it "fabulous" and wraps up the rest to go. She is on her way to a ski resort. She is going to be lifted by helicopter to the top of a mountain with untouched snow, and then she is going to ski down.

"Clang," goes the cowbell on the door as she leaves.

"Beep," goes the remote-controlled lock on her SUV.

"Dijon mustard," Louderman says as the woman drives away. "I don't know what Dijon mustard is. Don't care to find out, either."

When President Bush delivered his State of the Union speech this week, he addressed a nation that no longer approves of the job he is doing. According to recent polls, including a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last weekend, Bush's overall approval rating — as high as 92 percent just after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — is 42 percent, with the percentages even lower on specific issues, such as health care, the federal deficit and the war in Iraq.

But within that 42 percent are places where approval of Bush remains high, such as Nebraska, where it is at 55 percent, according to a recent poll, and Idaho, where it is 58 percent. Highest of all, though, at 61 percent, is Utah, which also gave him 71.5 percent of the vote in 2004, the highest of any state.

"The mindset of Utah," is how Frank Guliuzza III, chairman of the political science department at Weber State University in Ogden, explains the percentages. Not only is Utah the nation's most Republican state, "there's a sense of loyalty and patriotism that kind of overcomes the tendency toward cynicism that is evident in the rest of the country right now," he says.