Daniel Menaker is executive editor in chief of the Random House Publishing Group and the author of two short-story collections and a novel.

I arrived in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday, a spectacular day, all the happier to get off the tiny, plank-seated "regional" plane and into the bright sunshine for the delay at La Guardia caused by the mysterious and prolonged unavailability of a "wing-walker," as the pilot finally broke down and informed us—the wing-walker is the guy with the orange tubes who guides the plane out of the gate—after about a half an hour of thitherto inexplicable stasis; for the woman sitting next to me who kept elbowing me sharply as she angrily opened and closed the airline magazine to attack and retreat from the Mensa quiz; and for another woman a couple of rows back who had such a terribly rachitic cough that during our long period of wing-walkerlessness, the flight attendant came back and asked her if she was sure she wanted to stay on the plane.

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Since 1950, the city of Columbus—Ohio's capital since 1816, four years after its founding—has expanded in area from 39.9 square miles to 212.6 square miles. This quick sprawl may explain the Oaklandish feeling of arriving "downtown" virtually without realizing it. Oh, there is a red-brick central-looking area and a few tall buildings, but when I asked at the front desk where the sort of, you know, store-shopping-center kind of place was, the place where you could buy the things you forgot—a nail clipper, a cell-phone charger, and some earplugs to wear against the thunder of the long freight trains that rumble beneath the window in your room—Alissa told me, "Oh we have lots of malls everywhere here."

Tomorrow I'll go to ACT headquarters (America Coming Together, the 527 group that registers and canvasses voters in the battleground states) and start whatever it is I'm going to do with regard to voter enablement. I'll do what they tell me. I was born into a politically active family in Greenwich Village—my father's name was Robert Owen Menaker and his brothers were William Morris Menaker, Frederick Engels Menaker, etc. My mother helped organize the Newspaper Guild at Time Inc. So genes that have gone recessive for some decades of child-raising and career obsession have, because of the largeness of the stakes this time around, become dominant, at least for a week, and I'm volunteering in Ohio.

In New York I was given guidelines for what ACT volunteers can and can't say, in order to preserve the organization's appearance of nonpartisanship. I forget what they are, but they'll tell me again tomorrow. I do recall that use of the phrase "progressive state and federal candidates" is a verbal prophylactic, though "progressive" sounds both quaint and disturbing to me—it used to be a euphemism for "Communist" when I was a kid in a lefty household. My guess is that they will send me out to black neighborhoods in Columbus to go (slammed) door to (slammed) door and make sure that those who are registered intend to vote, that they'll have transportation if they need it, and just to take political temperatures. I am not a felon. I say this because back in June USA Today revealed that ACT had hired convicted felons to canvas in Missouri—sex offenders, burglars, etc.

Black Enterprise magazine recently put Columbus on the list of the 10 best cities for African-Americans to live in. It only made No. 9, however; maybe because there were 25 percent more discarded (non-counted) ballots in some black neighborhoods in Columbus in the 2000 election than elsewhere in the city, according to a local TV show this evening. Voter activists have been going around black precincts with sample ballots—Punch cards! Floridaesque punch cards complete with chads!—to demonstrate the chad debriding necessary to make a ballot valid. That newscast and lots of other phenomena make sure that when one is in a battleground state a week before the election, one knows it. The commercials on television are relentless, not only for Kerry and Bush but for judicial candidates and what sound like very minor state offices. My favorite so far was an ad pleading for support of Issue 106, the Columbus Zoo Levy. In the hotel, I asked the bartender what it is like to live in a battleground state, and she said, "Weird. You feel like you're in a huge family argument all the time." She went on to say that Teresa Kerry had stayed at the hotel, and security was incredibly tight. Someone else at the bar said he'd been in Chicago when Cheney was there a year ago, and there were German shepherds in all the hotel's elevators.

My fear, which has now been voiced by many others, has always been that a flood of progressives from the Northeast showing up on front porches with their burning eyes and desperate miens may frighten Ohioans into writing in Mr. Burns or someone like that for president.

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