I don’t like the president of the United States. I believe he is dishonest, dim witted and utterly incapable of commanding a lemonade stand, let alone a global superpower.

My general disdain for George W. Bush doesn’t make me unique, especially in San Francisco, and doesn’t make me any more righteous then those who love him. It has, however, repeatedly motivated me to ask the question: Who is voting for Bush, and more importantly, why?

I recently took a week to visit friends and family in Pennsylvania, a swing state, and in between the 27 partisan phone calls and unrelenting political info-commercials, my grandmother revealed a shocking secret one evening that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She was voting for Bush. Not only that, so was my grandfather.

Every awful, cutting remark I had ever made about Bush supporters being a bunch of selfish, greedy, ignorant mid-westerners who love shooting guns in the air while dancing around a pile of burning books, suddenly came into question.

My grandmother isn’t racist, sexist or a card-carrying member of the NRA. To the contrary, as a first-generation Italian immigrant, she is one the kindest, hardest working and most intelligent women I have ever met, and would always buy me G.I. Joe’s, even after my mother forbid it. Well, maybe that should have been a hint.
It suddenly struck me that my grandmother could be the window I needed into that other fifty percent of the nation that seemingly admired the president. I had heard rumors that they lived and bred in an area somewhere between L.A. and N.Y.

Having recovered from the initial shock of the news, my dad and I took to double-teaming the 78-year-old mother and grandmother as to her motivations for such a seemingly unthinkable act.

We started by grilling her with questions about the most obvious issue: Iraq. With the total of number of U.S. casualties at 1108, the country in chaos and no clear exit strategy in sight, this seemed like a no-brainer. The fact that the president’s only justification for war- that of Sadaam had stockpiles of WMD’s- being definitively disproven by an October U.N. weapons report, should only have strengthened our argument.

If that wasn’t sufficient, then America’s steady economic decline would seem to be a deal breaker. The New York Times and BBC both reported close to 2,931,000 private sector jobs lost, unemployment up 37 percent and a budget deficit of 5.6 trillion since Bush took office in 2000.

The president has also been accused by 60 minutes of fixing gas prices with the Prince of Saudi Arabia and awarding huge government contracts to Cheney’s sweetheart company Halliburton, with little or no bidding. The company has since been accused of massive over-billing practices that are now being investigated by our own government.

My grandma remained unimpressed, and sat silently as we continued to rant.

All right, she has always been very generous with her money and time, so the Bush administrations' continuous budgetary assault on nonprofit agencies such as Americorps, Boys and Girls Club and Headstart should get her going, right.

Additionally, a 2003 Ford Foundation study recently proved the president’s highly touted faith-based initiative programs, such as the supposed 86 percent success rate of Texas’s Teen Challenge and InnerChange, to be no better, “and in some cases, actually less effective,” than traditional social services programs.

I hoped that coming from a poor Sicilian family, my grandma would be able to relate with immigrants struggling to survive in a country still plagued with race, social and economic inequities. In a December article in Mother Jones, Bush squarely admitted, “I don’t understand how poor people think.”

At this point, my grandma still wasn’t understanding how my father and I thought either.

Being a devout Catholic, we knew we weren’t going to get anywhere by reminding her about Bush’s hateful, religiously motivated attacks on gays, lesbians, women and minorities. She would be less than sympathetic to legislation such as the Unborn Fetus Law, Patriot Act or a failed attempt at amending the U.S Constitution to ban gay marriage. We chose not to reference Al Gore’s heated comments in a November Washington Post article, well after he had any vested interest in bashing Bush.

They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, ‘big brother’-style government - toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book ‘1984’ - than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America,” Gore said.

As my mother worked over my grandfather in the opposite end of their small dining room, my dad and I played our final card. Using the classic conservative GOP battle cry of, “won’t somebody please think of the children,” we presented my grandma with some education figures.

In early 2003, California released the results of its statewide standardized test results, in order to gage the effectiveness of one of the president’s most prized pieces of legislation: No Child Left Behind. Almost two out of three schools didn’t cut it and, “instead, this massive law has generated little more than bad news, indifference and growing resistance,” reported Alexander Russo in an August MSNBC article.

My dad and I could have concluded our argument by tying all these elements together like a seasoned prosecutor handing a slam-dunk case over to the jury for deliberation. We could have harped on how our president has been allowed to lie, cheat and steal for the last four years, while pushing his dangerous, ultra-conservative agenda onto America and the world, under the guise of “national security” and “patriotism.” Or that no matter what John Kerry’s failures or shortcomings may be, we as a country couldn’t possibly be much worse off.

But instead my dad and I just stopped, convinced that our eloquent, overwhelming one-sided speech would sway my grandma away from the dark side.

“So what do you think,” I said, eager to hear, if nothing else, what it was that made a Bush supporter tick.

“That’s all very nice,” my grandma said. “But have you seen Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s hair style? I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine having to look at that for four years.”