US: The people in the Mission Hills Country Club, Kansas, would seem to be George Bush's natural constituency, the people the US President calls "the haves and have-mores". In the 2000 census, Mission Hills was ranked the fourth wealthiest city in the US: average income $188,821 a year.
Its mansions rival the most extravagant palaces of Europe and the Middle East. The Persian carpets in the clubhouse are plush; the chandeliers glitter. You half expect to see angels and lambs gambol over velvet lawns that stretch to the horizon.
There are in fact three country clubs in Mission Hills. It costs more than most Americans earn in a year to join, and you must be sponsored by four standing members. The manager of the first club I called said: "We don't talk to the press."
At the second, the club's president Phil Miller, a business lawyer and the head of the Kansas Golf Federation, invited me to lunch with his golf cronies at the Terrace Lounge. My impression that nothing could stop Bush's re-election was about to be shaken.
Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one in Johnson County, where Mission Hills is located. But moderate Republicans in this privileged enclave admit they have more in common with Democrats than with the conservative fundamentalist Christians in the place they refer to as "outstate Kansas".
Put more bluntly, in Kansas, the geographic centre of the US, the "Mods" and the "Cons" hate each other. The seizure of the school board by the Cons last month revived an unending battle over the teaching of creationism in public schools. And some Mods are angry enough about Bush's alliance with the Cons to punish him by voting for John Kerry.
Republicanism is part of Kansas's quintessential American-ness. As Thomas Frank notes in his brilliant analysis of contemporary US politics, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the US Senate since 1932. Frank quotes John Gunther in 1947: "The Kansan is the most average of all Americans, a kind of common denominator for the entire continent."
But 13 years ago, the reasonable, rational foundations of Kansan Republicanism that produced Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senator Bob Dole were transformed when the national anti-abortion movement Operation Rescue staged its Summer of Mercy in Wichita. The Mods and Cons have been at war ever since, several times losing to Democrats through their division. Two years ago, the Mods refused to back a Con candidate, handing the governor's office to the Dems. They were denounced as "quislings and collaborators".
"Lots of people here would consider me heretical," Phil Miller, our 53-year-old lunch host, admits straightaway. He was a political moderate at university, but America's swing to the right makes him feel like a liberal.
"This election is very important; the ballooning deficit and the collapse of the social security system will affect us and our children for the next 25 years. I don't think Kerry or Bush can sort out the mess in Iraq . . . It was not by accident that the only person in the cabinet advising against it (Secretary of State Colin Powell) was a soldier."
Miller is frustrated that the Democrats "could not find a better-qualified person" than John Kerry, but he will vote Kerry.
"Phil, I never realised we were such kindred spirits!" exclaims Jim Houx (58), a senior engineering and construction executive. Houx is what the Cons call a Rino - Republican in Name Only. "Regime Change Starts at Home" says the bumper sticker on his luxury car.
"I always thought I was conservative," Houx explains. "I'm a registered Republican. But more and more people latch on to religion. Abortion matters more to them than healthcare or energy policy. Important issues have taken a back seat to their homophobia."
Houx hands me an opinion piece published in the Kansas City Star this week that reflects his views. In it, a Republican public relations consultant named Susan Pepperdine quotes Ronald Reagan once saying: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me."
"It's time for moderate Republicans to follow his lead in the opposite direction," Pepperdine writes, listing "tax cuts to fat cats", and the Cons' obsession with stem-cell research, abortion, gay marriage, under-age sex, creationism, drugs, flag-burning and fighting gun control as reasons to ditch the party.
Kansas City straddles the state line, and Kansans feel superior to Missouri, just a few hundred metres across the golf course. The US Attorney General John Ashcroft previously held office as attorney general, governor and senator in Missouri. He embodies all that my luncheon companions hate about the Cons.
When he arrived in Washington, Ashcroft draped a cloth over the naked breast of a statue representing justice. This week, it was announced that US networks which showed singer Janet Jackson's dress slipping off her breast last winter are to be fined $500,000. "It's absurd that we should be wasting time and energy on such things," groans Houx.
David Flanders (56), a corporate recruiter, is uncomfortable with talk of politics, abortion and religion - subjects never raised in the polite society he grew up in. But Flanders articulates a common theme in this election year: distrust of politicians.
"I feel strongly we know very little of what's going on," says Flanders. The only clue to his political leanings is a statement that "the most radical groups are the very, very far right, like Fred Phelps." Phelps, a disbarred lawyer from Topeka who runs a "God Hates Fags" campaign, is so extreme that even the Cons disown him.
A US resident since 1995, the Rev Edward Thompson, from Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, is senior pastor at Kansas City's Second Presbyterian Church. He cannot vote, but if he could, Thompson would vote Kerry.
"I'm fearful that Bush will get in on a God ticket," he says. "If I could wrestle anything out of the Republicans' hands, it would be the scriptures."
More than a decade has passed since another respected Kansas City Presbyterian, the Rev Robert Meneilly, famously declared in a sermon that the Cons represented "a threat far greater than the old threat of communism".
Mr Thompson was alarmed by a recent e-mail from Long Island. "It was about how we must vote for George Bush because this is God's purpose," he said. "It sent a chill down my spine. History proves that messianic figures become despotic. We must rescue the interpretation of what's in The Book from the conservative right, who believe they've been ordained by God."
But ultimately, George Bush can probably count on that ungodly old instinct, greed, to deliver the vote of the disgruntled Mods.
"I was talking with a golfing buddy recently," Phil Miller says, "and I asked him: 'How can you say you're in favour of small government and you like Bush?' He finally admitted that he liked the tax cut. I told him that was short-sighted, that it was on the backs of our kids and grandchildren."
Monday: On the Indian reservations of South Dakota, native American have learned from the disenfranchisement of blacks in Florida four years ago. They tell Lara Marlowe why their voting drive is important