The team of advisers, wonks, gurus and hangers-on who surround Mr George W. Bush in his governor's mansion in Austin are, to say the least, an interesting bunch.
They are a different tribe entirely from the slick, pragmatic New Democrats in power at the moment. They have more in common with the Reaganauts than the subsequent court run by Bush the Elder. If the US has swung to the Republicans overnight, these are the people who will swing the US to the right.
Mr Bush's key economic adviser is Mr Larry Lindsey, an early adherent from the Reagan era of supply-side economics. The doctrine (famously derided as "voodoo economics" by the governor's dad) provides a rationale for giving tax cuts to the rich.
The theory is that rich people would invest their windfall in the stock market, providing a morale-boosting injection of funds and investment capital to create jobs, providing "trickle-down" wealth to the ordinary people. The supply-siders thus provide a do-good gloss to the Bush tax-cut plan, which would hand $81 billion (60 per cent of the total reduction) to the richest 13 million taxpayers.
The foreign affairs team also has an 1980s feel to it. Ms Condoleeza Rice, the likely national security adviser in the event of a Bush win, worked for the governor's father, but is a child of the cold-war mentality which reigned supreme under President Reagan. In terms of economic and foreign policy then, a Bush White House would be expected to be merely a throwback. It is the underlying ethos (what the governor would undoubtedly call "the heart") of a future Republican administration that would be truly exotic, even bizarre.
Mr Bush's favourite slogan, "compassionate conservatism", is no empty jingle: it is actually borrowed from a body of work by a pair of obscure conservative gurus, whose influence would surely grow exponentially if the Republicans recapture the White House.
One is Mr Myron Magnet, a cultural hawk from the right-wing Manhattan Institute. His rival for Mr Bush's heart and soul is a Marxist turned born-again Christian from Texas, Mr Marvin Olasky, who believes the machinery of state-provided social welfare should be swapped for a return to 19th-century-style religious charities and soup kitchens.
Mr Olasky has come on a long intellectual journey. Born into a Boston Jewish family in 1950, he renounced his religion at the age of 14 and became an avowed atheist. At Yale, he joined the Communist Party and in 1972 travelled to Moscow on a Russian freighter, to prove his Marxist-Leninist ardour.
His 180-degree transformation came only a year later, apparently as a result of watching a lot of Hollywood westerns. He was doing a graduate degree in American culture at the University of Michigan, focusing on US cinema. He later said that the profound moral sense of right and wrong he found in the western genre raised in his Marxist mind the nagging question: "What if there is a God?"
He now teaches journalism at the University of Texas, but most of his effort is spent in publishing a right-wing Christian conservative journal ambitiously called World (largely devoted to the denunciation of President Clinton and all his evils) and running the church he founded in Austin, the Redeemer Presbyterian.
The Redeemer church teaches that women have no place in leadership, having already engineered the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. Mr Olasky once said that there was a certain shame attached to the idea of voting for a woman, because it meant that men had failed in their role.
Mr Olasky also believes that liberal journalists have "holes in their souls" and practise "the religion of Zeus", which came as something of a surprise to the east coast press. "What could he mean?" they wondered. Frank Rich, a veteran columnist at the New York Times, and one of those accused of having a hole in his soul, said: "He still hasn't told me whether the religion of Zeus goes in for bar mitzvahs."
These distractions aside, the driving force behind Mr Olasky's church work and his prolific writing is the war against social welfare. His 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, argues that the Great Society programmes launched in the 1960s sapped the moral strength from the poor by providing a prop. Instead, Mr Olasky teaches that charity should be channelled through faith-based organisations, which would distribute largesse accompanied by the required religious fortification, to counter the character-rotting impact of giving things away for nothing.
Mr Myron Magnet is cut from similar cloth to Mr Olasky. The conservative prophet sports big Dickensian bushy whiskers (apparently inspired by a stay at Cambridge University) and a Victorian philosophy to match.
His seminal work, The Dream and the Nightmare, espouses many of the same ideas as Mr Olasky, arguing that many of the country's present social problems are a direct result of the 1960s counterculture, which "permitted, even celebrated, behaviour that when poor people practise it will imprison them inextricably in poverty."
Mr Bush said the book "really helped crystallise some of my thinking about cultures, changing cultures, and of part of the legacy of my generation". The underlying philosophy has surfaced in his campaign rhetoric in the form of his biting criticism of the philosophy of "If it feels good, do it".
From an examination of the brains behind Mr Bush's catchphrases, this is more than a promise not to have oral sex in the Oval Office. It suggests a Bush victory would bring a new political class to town which looks backwards for its inspiration, not just to the halcyon days of Mr Reagan, but far further, to a bygone Victorian age where there were Bibles in the soup kitchens, and the poor knew their place.