Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report:

The old boy was about as redneck as they come, at least in terms of the stereotype the term supposedly represents. A star lineman for a championship Ole Miss football team 35 years ago, he now markets men's clothing lines to a vanishing breed of independent department stores throughout the east, launching traveling forays from his tiny hometown near Tupelo in rural northeast Mississippi.

He was in New York City for a couple weeks on business, and a niece was being married in Washington, D.C., so he happened onto the same Amtrak train I was taking returning home from the Elton John concert at the Radio City Music Hall.

I made the mistake of sitting at one of the few tables in each railcar, which was an invitation to have someone sit across from me and disturb my peace for the entire ride. And this boy did. Not only was he redneck-like but he was an extrovert. Naturally, he was a salesman, after all. I have no doubt he was a good one. So, as much as I tried to stay buried in my newspaper when he arrived, and he feigned respect for that at first, he couldn't resist edging in a question that led to a three hour conversation.

He could sense the need to tone down the discriminatory cracks with me and I could sense that he was laboring at it a bit. But he wanted to talk sports, politics and the economy, steering clear of religion.

Much to my surprise, we had a lot that we agreed on about all three.

Most surprisingly to me, he remarked that George W. Bush is in a lot of trouble with the election, including from him. He declared that he voted for Bush in 2000, but would not this November.

He said that if things do not turn around for him, dramatically, he was going to lose. He said he could not imagine what could happen to turn it around enough between now and Election Day.

I was even more surprised at his reaction to my expressions of disfavor with Bush over the invasion of Iraq and the consequences of that policy. I don't think he was being polite when he agreed with just about everything I said, including the cost of the war in terms of U.S. lives, lives of the Iraqi people, and U.S. taxpayer dollars, as well as its lack of justification.

Now, I could've written this fellow off as a right wing fanatic, to the right of the GOP. But he did not spout any of that ideology, or even any of the telltale code words. He did not get religious and had good things to say about Sen. Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.

He remains very connected to the University of Mississippi and was intelligent and knowledgeable in our conversation about every aspect of the economy of his state. He's friends with the Manning family, which has now produced two star quarterbacks for the National Football League. As a lineman, he blocked for their dad, Archie Manning, when he was the QB at Ole Miss. He's worried that young Eli will be thrown into the limelight too fast.

Nope, this fellow was simply "American heartland," through and through, all his personal limitations, notwithstanding. He was smart and opinionated, but in a pragmatic and not a stupid way.

A person like this does not shape his opinions in a vacuum, however. He's a regular guy in contact with scores of others in a sequence of concentric circles away from his closest contacts. When someone like this says they've given up on Bush, it means something.

I came away impressed and heartened, not so much by the guy as by what I learned. Maybe people out there in America are paying more attention than many realize about what's really going in Washington. Maybe even the combination of Fox News and the abject failure of the mainstream U.S. media to adequately scrutinize the present administration and its policy decisions has not prevented some essential realities from leaking out there and into the heads of reasonable people.

To the pragmatic American mind, Bush was hired to do a job in 2000, and failed the test. The invasion of Iraq has been a bust. The 9/11 and pre-Iraq intelligence failures can be blamed on anyone, but they happened on his watch and they are monumental fiascos. Osama bin Laden remains at large and the economy has hit a squishy patch, to paraphrase Greenspan. Bush will not be rehired in 2004.