Three rottweilers paced in the yard behind a cyclone fence, silhouetted from the porchlight behind them. I checked the house number again, hoping I had misread. Nope. A sign in the yard read: “I’m a bitter gun owner and I vote.” Here is where my life as a Republican would have to begin.

I got out of the car and approached the front gate. The house was a double-wide, elevated above the big yard, in a neighborhood of humble two-story homes. The rottweilers began to bark at me, standing on hind legs, front paws on top of the fence. A woman came out onto the porch and greeted me. She whistled for the dogs to go inside. They obeyed. “They must have smelled my dog,” I said, trying to break the ice. “Conservative dogs,” said the woman, with a baby on her hip. Her name was Ginny Glaus, and she would be the hostess of my first McCain Nation event, a presidential debate watching party.

In my lifetime, there have been two—count ‘em, two—Democratic presidents. Elections for me are a ritual of lowered expectations, hand-wringing, and hopeless wishing. It’s like rooting for a sports team that always loses in the championship game. This year, despite everything the Republicans have done, it could happen again. Despite the drag on his campaign precipitated by the financial crisis, John McCain still has a decent chance of landing in the White House come January. And if he is to win, he needs my state.

I decided to my try out being a Republican because I was tired of complaining about all the things that were wrong with this country, and wanted to know the people who see the complete opposite: the GOP grassroots. If McCain wins, it will be because their values, their desires, and their fears, resonate more vividly than my own. I’m done hating on these folks: I just want to ‘get’ them. Plus, I realized, driving over to Ginny’s house, I’d get the voyeuristic pleasure of knowing what it would feel like to belong to a party that actually won big elections. Who are these people? With everything gone wrong in the last 8 years, why are they still Republicans? And, implausible as it may sound could I ever become one?

Of course, changing political identities would take a little doing. My parents were 60s liberals, and I spent much my childhood going to protest marches. But, I figured, I’d spent enough time around conservatives to know what they sound like. I’ve seen Fox News. I’ve even worked at conservative newspaper. As I’ve grown older, had kids, and bought a house, I’ve even noticed some unmistakably conservative thoughts creeping into my consciousness. I’ve become a guy who scowls at the way kids let their underwear show these days, or our ridiculous property tax bill, or the satellite dishes I see pinned to brick façades of section 8 apartment buildings in my neighborhood. I wanted to channel that inner Republican, in an effort to see what the other half thought, and why thought it.

With the invention of the Internet, becoming a Republican has become relatively easy. I entered my email address into the John McCain Web site and with the click of a mouse, I had joined the McCain Nation. Another click later, and I had signed on with my first McCain Nation event: a nearby debate watching party, at the home of Ginny Glaus.

Ginny led me into a wood-panelled living room, with a giant TV on one wall and a menagerie festooned with Penguin statuary on the other. Ginny was a youngish woman with dirty blond hair pulled back. She introduced me to her husband, Ron, who was slightly older, perhaps in his late 30s. They were a squat, heavyset couple with matching NRA t-shirts. There was one other guest, Gertrude, a woman in her fifties who worked at a hospital.

Ron and Ginny’s 15-month-old twins toddled around on the beige carpet, navigating among the rottweilers, who had plopped themselves, jowls and all, on the floor. Zeus, the biggest dog, came up to me and put his muzzle on my knee. Ginny walked back and forth to the kitchen, shuttling brownies and cookies to the living room. She handed me an orange plastic cup of water. Ron sat on a swivel chair. A PC on the desk behind him flashed screensaver pictures of their twins, their dogs, and ivory-handled vintage revolvers. The back of Ron’s t-shirt read, “The Second Amendment: America’s original homeland security.” There was a gun-themed wall-clock, two mock-antique revolvers crossing barrels around the rim.

“We were just getting acquainted,” said Ron, as I sat down in a cushy la-z boy next to the front door. He had ruddy, pillowy cheeks, a buzz cut, mustache and wire-framed glasses. He wore dark blue jeans, and black plastic crocs (those shoes with holes in them). “We’re constitutional conservatives,” he said. “We believe in the Constitution as it was originally written.” I nodded.

“Frankly,” he said, looking at me squarely, “given your profession, I’m a little surprised that you’re not more liberal.” Okay, I thought. Here it is. He’s googled me. He knows I’m a journalist. Time to put my story out there. I told him that I’d worked for a conservative newspaper, that I quit that to work for myself, and make more money--what conservative doesn’t want more money, after all? This was basically true, though I left out the parts about following my passion or any sentence with the words “personal discovery” in them. “The key to lying,” my wife said, before I left the house that night, “is not going too far from the truth.”

I told Ron, “I’ve never really been very political, but just with this election I thought I should do something.”

“Me too,” said Gertrude, seated to my right on a brown and tan plaid couch. “My husband didn’t come; he’s a registered Democrat, from the unions, but he’s not voting for that man.”

Ron explained that he had been an emergency medical technician until he was severely injured in a fire; a man had set fire to his house to recoup insurance. “This was several years ago,” Ron said. “If I hadn’t been wearing my Nomex, I would have been cremated.”

Ron’s injuries ended his life as an EMT. He was put on permanent disability. He told us he now worked in “retail sales” for “the evil empire--Wal-Mart.” Capitalism at its worst he said. “And best,” Gertrude said. “They’ve really drunk the kool-aid on ‘global warming, though,” Ron said. “What a hoax,” Ginny said.

I couldn’t bring myself to concur, but let the conversation slide away. I asked what they thought about the federal bailout--which had been making waves in the news—Michael Savage was railing about it on right-wing radio that night, which I listened to on the ride over, trying to cram before my Republican debut. “Unfortunately,” Ron said, “we’re going to have to swallow a small dose of socialism right now.” He then explained to me how the mortgage crisis originated in the 1970s. “This all started when Fannie Mae forced the banks to loan inside the red lines—the inner-city, otherwise, they said we’re gonna call you a racist. These are people who can’t even afford a Big Mac, what do you think was gonna happen?” This was a line of thinking I’d seen on Republican web sites, a kind of thinly veiled attempt to foist the credit crisis on low-class minorities. Like the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ canard, this one had broad circulation.

We talked about why we were getting involved with the campaign. Here was my chance to channel my inner Republican.

“I just don’t want my taxes to go up,” I said, groaning.

“Me neither,” Gertrude said.

“He’s going to repeal the Bush tax cuts,” Ron said, incredulous. I looked around the house—these folks didn’t have much. It struck me that Obama’s plan would probably cut their tax burden, but that didn’t seem to matter to Ron. “Tax cuts create jobs,” Ron would say during the debate, like a mantra, whenever Obama spoke about his economic plan.

When the debate came on, we watched in something close to silence. Ginny paced. The twins were kept inside a plastic fence they usually put on their lawn to corral them. Ginny sat on a chair next to the corral and fed them Yoplait yogurt. Later, one of the twins climbed up onto Gertrude’s lap and sucked her thumb, gazing into the kitchen with sleepy toddler eyes. “She’s the lover,” Ginny said.

Ron sat on his swivel chair near the computer. Whenever Obama stuttered or stammered, he laughed. “He can’t talk if he’s not in front of a teleprompter.” Apparently, Obama’s teleprompter had gone down during a speech, and his subsequent flubbering had made the rounds on right-wing Web sites.

When Obama said he’d work to get everybody in America health care, Ron shook his head and muttered, “That’s not your job.” Caroline said: “You want health care, go work in a hospital. I do. You can be a nurse, an assistant and get health care. Alls you have to do is push someone around and you get health care.”

Obama’s assertion that he’d talk with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran “without preconditions” set off another bilious eruption from Ron. “CAKE!” he shouted at the television. “CAKE! He called Israel a stinking corpse! How can you talk to someone who called Israel a stinking corpse? Just invite them over for cake?”

Midway through, I asked Ron how he thought the debate was going. “I know who sounds like a commander in chief, and who sounds like a babbling idiot,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair.

When it was over, I actually thought McCain “won” the debate, but I couldn’t get anyone to say much about it. I was surprised they were so subdued. I guess I’d imagined more of a pep rally atmosphere. Instead, there was a hint of resignation that this might not be their year. “The thing with Obama is he’s all about the young people,” explained Ginny, after she’d put the twins to bed. “They get taken up with his celebrity—they don’t even know what they’re voting for.”

“I remember when I was 23,” Gertrude said. “I met a woman who was crazy for Reagan. I asked her why and she said “I just don’t want to pay for all these welfare people.’ At the time, I didn’t even know that’s what was happening.”

They had the appalled, incredulous air of people who couldn’t believe the other party’s candidate might win, when he so clearly was the wrong choice. It’s funny, I thought, because that’s exactly how I felt during the last election, and after I saw Sarah Palin’s convention speech.

Ron told me about a show called Patriot Radio, on every 9 pm to midnight on Sirius radio. “All second amendment stuff,” he said. At the start of every show, they recite the second amendment, he said. Then Ron recited it, emphasizing the words “free state” in the explanatory second clause. He told me about Heller vs. DC. I didn’t recognize the name. This was the case in which the Supreme court overturned the DC handgun ban. Heller was bringing another case against DC—the court’s ruling held all semi-automatic guns were “machine guns.” “So my semi-automatic Springfield Armory XD is now a MACHINE GUN??” he said. “How does it feel?” I said, and we all shared a chuckle.

I realized there was a whole Republican vocabulary of which I was keenly oblivious—Obama’s teleprompter, the ‘stinking corpse’, DC v. Heller. Essentially, these folks lived in a different world than me—one that viewed the outside world as inherently dangerous—full of cons and thieves, who needed to be treated with caution and forbearance. Gun ownership as metaphor. Our national government bears the marks of this worldview.

As I was leaving, Ron shouted at me one last admonition, over my shoulder: “Vote Freedom First!”