In Oklahoma, a Patriotic Silence

At more than a dozen town hall meetings in the past two weeks, Boren has heard the subject of Iraq come up voluntarily only once, in Atoka. In Hugo, Jackson did growl, almost under his breath, "Some of us spent our lives cleaning up political and diplomatic messes," after Boren spoke of diplomacy in Iran. But that was as close as the crowd came to the war without prompting.

And it's not as if Boren doesn't try. With the Iraq war's commanding general, David H. Petraeus, set to deliver a progress report by mid-September, Boren implored the crowd that packed the old train depot and Harvey House restaurant to give him advice. He has flirted with legislation, introduced in the Senate, that would mandate a change of mission in Iraq, away from combat toward counterterrorism and training of Iraqi forces, without mandating troop withdrawals. Just before recess, he voted for a measure requiring that troops be granted home leaves at least as long as their last deployments, a measure similar to earlier proposals he called "micromanaging."

But he knows that his leadership will push him for far more: language -- tied to continued war funding -- that would set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces.

"I would like to hear from you all, specifically," he practically begged, his white cotton shirt still neatly pressed, his khakis and BlackBerry a bit out of place amid the battered blue jeans of the ranchers and the ponytails of the quiet Choctaws. "I want to hear your opinions."

That prompted John Bancroft, 60, to chime in on behalf of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and his plan to partition Iraq into three largely autonomous zones -- Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish.

"These people are never going to get along together," Bancroft said. "We're never going to solve the military problem until we solve the political problem."

But in his shorts, high socks and almost fashionably unshaven face, the substitute middle school teacher and founder of something called the ARS Poetica Institute was admittedly an outlier in Hugo. The next questioner asked Boren whom he was supporting in the presidential race -- answer: at the moment, nobody, certainly not Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) -- and Iraq never came back up.

That is not to say Eastern Oklahoma doesn't care. The hurt here seems deep, as does the frustration. Brad Wells, a grizzled rancher who looks well beyond his 46 years, railed against the conduct of the war but out of Boren's earshot. "One hundred twenty-five, 150,000 troops aren't going to bring peace to that country," he fumed, and now there aren't the troops needed to confront a nuclear Iran or, heaven forbid, an ascendant China.

But, he added: "We have to stay there. We have to do it right. . . . If they pull the troops out of Iraq, they might as well give the world to China."

So why didn't he speak up at the meeting?

"I don't want to embarrass him," Wells said with a shrug. "I believe he's a good man."

"You know, I came here because I wanted to thank Dan Boren," confided Sharon Ridenour, owner of Hugo's City Body Shop and Wrecker Service, and a Democrat who voted for Bush. "He's standing behind the president and standing behind the veterans."

Boren's independence sits well with the ticket-splitters of his district who defy pigeonholes and revel in their own iconoclasm. Bush took 59 percent of the vote in 2004; Boren, 73 percent two years later. In nearby Fort Towson, on June 23, 1865, the final treaty ending the Civil War was signed by Brig. Gen. Stand Waite, the last Confederate officer to lay down his arms. Conservative by nature, Hugo is, oddly enough, the winter quarters of three of the country's largest circuses.

The town was named after the French novelist Victor Hugo, a stretch, it would seem, for a hamlet without a Starbucks. And its residents cheered as Boren bragged about raising the minimum wage and trying to mandate insurance coverage for colon cancer screening, then cheered again when he vowed never to endorse Clinton for president.

As he spoke of the pressure his positions have generated from his caucus, his wife, Andrea, demure and slim though just weeks from delivering their first child, watched sympathetically. They then walked hand in hand to their Chevy Equinox and climbed in for the two-hour ride back to Muskogee -- and the wait for September.