i think if the president ever got to know me, he'd like me. maybe he'd even give me a nickname and say i was doing a heckuva job here at harvard.

From CNN.com:

[Virginia gubernatorial candidate] Jerry Kilgore got a boost Monday from President Bush, who made a last-minute dash into Virginia to urge die-hard conservatives to help turn out voters for the former attorney general.

"The thing I like about this fellow is he grew up on a farm," Bush said in a brief stop on his return from a South American trade mission. "He doesn't have a lot of fancy airs."

Reading In Cold Blood the other night had been reminiscing a lot about growing up on a farm. [Spoiler warning not for In Cold Blood and Capote] The book is about a farm family that is murdered by two men who believed (erroneously) that there was $10,000 in a safe in the house. A nice thing about my family and our little house on the prairie, I suppose, is that no one ever would have had any delusions that we had a bunch of money in a safe somewhere. Which doesn't mean that my mother is free from worries about criminal victimization, much of which seems to be the result of a knack she has for being able to adapt on-the-fly the things she sees in urban crime dramas to sinister scenarios that could unfold in middle-of-nowhere Iowa.