My friend Robby, God bless him, has endured my writing about him before, so I don't think he would mind if I do it again--this time, in response to a phone call he made to me today in which he really did say, as soon as I answered the phone: 

"Thank you for not blaming me for the rest of my party's insanity."

Some of you may remember that Robby is my friend who is a bona fide, card-carrying right-wing Republican.  A passionate gun collector and member of the NRA, he actually LIKES Ann Coulter and Ted Nugent ("I wish I was their illegitimate child"), Chuck Norris is one of his heroes, and he's one of the dwindling minority who believes George W. Bush was...well, if not actually a GOOD president...he, er, MEANT WELL.

You'd think we'd hate one another, but we've been friends for years, and no one else could have possibly been more supportive of me when my son was deployed--and I say that knowing that I gave him utter, outraged, infuriated HELL about Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld year after year, and he took it because he loves me and because he understood how terrified I was for my son.  Eventually, he even came to see my point where the war was concerned.

But during the recent presidential campaign, Robby called me one day to say that he had given up listening to talk radio, something he had done faithfully for more than 15 years.  The blatant racism he heard there was so offensive to him that he complained to me that, "My party ran away from me," and that, as far as people like Rush Limbaugh were concerned:  "I don't know who they think I am when they claim to speak for conservative Republicans, because I am not that person."

Of course he voted for McCain, but he told me that, even though he disagreed with Obama on most things and would have preferred seeing a Republican back in the White House, he considered Obama to be calm, rational, reasoned, intelligent, and careful about making decisions.

(Something, by the way, my conservative Republican brother has also said.)

It was Robby who came to me when the viral e-mail campaign started going around in earnest to conservatives, claiming that Obama was dead-set to take away all our guns.  Robby had checked those claims out himself, both in legitimate websites such as the NRA, and in right-wing political blogs, and said that, as far as he could tell, it was all sheer baloney.

"Obama has never said a single word, not during the campaign, and not since he's taken office, that would appear to validate these fear-mongering e-mails," he said.  "As far as I'm concerned, they have been started and kept going by gun-sellers and others who stand to profit from panic-buying."

He was disgusted at that because it meant he couldn't find ammunition just to go to target practice, and felt that the constant hysteria whipped up by those e-mails--juxtaposed to Obama's calm, sensible demeanor--was making his party look crazier and crazier, which, as a lifelong Republican, he resented.

It's been one thing after another.

Today, he called because he was just so embarrassed, this time, by the whole Judge Sotomayor frenzy.

I said, "My husband just told me he'd gotten three e-mails today all about how Judge Sotomayor is going to take away all our guns."

With a heavy sigh, he said, "And yet, just yesterday, President Obama signed into law a provision that will allow gun enthusiasts to carry loaded weapons in national parks."

"I know," I said, "and there are a lot of us on the left who are dismayed at that.  It was an ammendment stuck onto the budget by a conservative congressman, and he really wanted the budget passed, so he had to hold his nose and sign it."

"But that's the thing about it that I appreciate," he replied.  "He didn't go before the cameras and make this big show about how he was being forced to sign the law even though he hated it.  He just did it quietly.  He knew that, the political reality of any sitting president is that they have to make onerous political sacrifices sometimes in order to get something bigger and more important passed later on.  None of them like it, but they all have to do it eventually. 

"The difference with Obama," he added, "is that he doesn't grandstand about it."

I commented about the presence of so many Blue Dog Democrats who'd been elected from very conservative states, such as Montana and Utah, who have pressed the president on gun rights.  They have to be able to show their constituents that they have upheld their pro-life, pro-gun values.  It doesn't mean that he has to sell out to them, but it does mean that he has to give them little victories now and then so that he can count on them later for the big things, like health care and energy legislation.

We talked about how, if the Republican Party really wants to keep from disintigrating, it is going to have to reach out to a few "Blue Dogs" in its own party, meaning, moderates like Colin Powell and others with more nuanced views on national security and more liberal views on social issues such as gay rights.

In other words, they have to move toward the middle.  And in a situation such as the one facing Republicans right now--they'd better, if they want to survive.

Robby told me about a right-wing friend of his who still listens to talk-radio, and how frustrated he's grown with her blind acceptance of everything she hears there.  "They're still talking about the Muslim connection," he complained.  "Can you believe that?"

The thing is, Robby is a loyal Republican, and he is a conservative--make no mistake about that--but he feels that the party has tilted SO far to the right that now they seem to be embracing only the loudest, most extreme points of view as representative of the party as a whole, which he finds deeply embarrassing and deeply offensive.  He knows there's a fairly obvious undercurrent of racism to the whole thing, and even though he's a white male redneck (and proud of it)--that does not mean he is racist.

My sister, who is also a conservative Republican, understands that very well.  After the death of our daddy in his 40's, my mother moved my much-younger sisters to Texarkana, where they grew up.  (I'd grown up in Dallas and was already in college and out of the house.)

So my sister pretty much embraced the whole Southern redneck, biker, beer-drinking, country-music-listening themes of that background, well into her adulthood.  But a few years ago, after a particularly painful divorce, she moved, first to anything-goes Austin, where she lived for four or five years, and then to Abilene, which is also a conservative city, but not in the same way as Texarkana.

"Family values" yes.  Racist attacks on a sitting president, no.

And over time, her viewpoints changed.  Though still conservative in many ways, she was a big Obama supporter even before I was, only the campaign was much harder on her, emotionally, than it was for me, because she was still on the right-wing e-mail merry-go-round, and every day, she received the most vile, hateful, nasty stuff in her Inbox from her former "friends."

Usually, she'd forward them on to me to debunk, and even though she told some of the people on her list--or maybe BECAUSE she told them--that she was an Obama supporter, they continued to flood her mailbox with crap.

Eventually, she met a truly fine man, and fell deeply in love for possibly the last--if not the first--time in her life, and moved to be closer to him.

And then one day, she got an e-mail from one of her old right-wing friends.  It was titled, "Ships Named for Presidents."  There was the U.S.S. George Bush and the U.S.S. Bill Clinton, and so on.

Then there was the "U.S.S. Barack Obama."

And the photograph depicted a rattletrap Haitian refugee boat, laden with black people, some hanging off the edges.

This one was the proverbial camel-straw--immediately she responded to the "friend" who had sent it, saying, "I thought you should know that I have a new boyfriend whom I love very much.  And he is an African-American."

She said she never heard from that person again.  Doesn't expect to.  Doesn't want to.

What these two stories of people close to me tells me is something that is verified by an op-ed written by Nicholas D. Kristof in today's New York Times:  "Would You Slap Your Father?  If So, You're a Liberal."

It starts out pretty funny, describing various studies that show the differences between, not just points of view of liberals and conservatives, but emotions as well.

In one study, participants were asked if they were performing in a comedy skit that required them to slap their fathers, and they asked his permission, and he said yes--would they do it?

Those who leaned liberal, the study said, would do so as long as Dad said it would be okay. 

Those who leaned conservative would NEVER slap their fathers, under any circumstances, for any reason.

Kristof writes:

"The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren't a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you'll have trouble harrumphing.

"One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty -- and revulsion at disgust."

Referring to a column he'd written before on the subject of differences between liberals and conservatives, Kristof says he'd suggested that the best way for people of any persuasion to open themselves up to the best information (rather than spoon-feeding themselves from the pool of like minds), was to engage someone of the opposite point of view in lively debate from time to time.

But a scientist friend called Kristof on that theory, explaining that all such a process would do is "inflame antagonisms."

In other words, neither of us would change our minds, but would most likely wind up with wounded feelings and maybe a cutting-off of a relationship.

So how, as Kristof says, "do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empiracal?"

It seems we should follow the example that has been set by our own president:

"A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side -- ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down "us vs. them" battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side's morality, even if it's not our morality.

""Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart," Professor Haidt says. "Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games."

"Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public's growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.

"A corollary is that the most potent way to win over opponents is to accept that they have legitimate concerns, for that triggers an instinct to reciprocate. As it happens, we have a brilliant exemplar of this style of rhetoric in politics right now -- Barack Obama."