Voting 2004: This time it's personal

How personal has this election gotten?

Put it this way: It followed Ted G. Jelen into his doctor's office in Nevada last week.

It went to work with Lisa Kellogg, a San Gabriel Valley preschool teacher who found herself arguing with a parent in the thick of morning drop-off.

It tracked Karen Dalrymple, a Michigan software developer, into the garage where the mechanic servicing her red Ford Focus should have kept his opinions to himself.

In the Del Webb retirement community of Lincoln, near Sacramento, it prompted a man to storm out of the billiards room this month and down a hall where the Democratic Club had spilled out of its meeting quarters. ("He was just waving his pool stick and shouting, 'I don't have to listen to this crap! Take it inside!' " said Nancy Krause, a 67-year-old retired administrative assistant who was there.)

At the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, it trailed 75 congregants into the Tuesday night Bible study. "One of the young ladies communicated she was a supporter of [President] Bush, and people started, well, not to boo exactly but you could hear grumbling and rumbling," said Elder Ben Stephens, the church's college and young adult pastor. The mood was sufficiently ticklish that he ended the session with 2 Chronicles, 7:14:

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

As the clock winds down on the most polarized presidential race in a generation, the mood of the electorate is almost unbearably emotional -- and there's nowhere to hide. Partisan politics, something normal people avoid in workaday human relations, appear to have gone to a place few have seen since the Vietnam War era, to the point that many confess they just want this election to be over.

The spinning and selling, they say, the doublespeak and dissembling, have managed not just to sway and confuse as political operatives intended, but to set neighbor on neighbor. ("Red states, blue states -- we're a nation of gang colors," one political scientist observed sadly last week.)