“There is,” he said, during an ad-lib speech somewhere in the brown stucco sprawl outside San Diego, “a golden alpine field within each of you, a place where you are bathed in approval, not because of anything particular you have done, but simply because of your own sacred nature. If you had a president who could show you the route to that place, what a difference it would make in your lives, and in the culture of the world!”I imagined intellectuals and anti-intellectuals mocking him in living rooms across the country. “Golden alpine field,” they’d be saying. “My own sacred nature. What kind of bullcrap is that?”But by then I had started listening more and more closely to what Jesus said. On the one hand, our work with him was very much exterior work: the speeches, the logistics, the nitty-gritty of trying to convince large numbers of people to vote for him. On the other hand, in California especially, all of us felt that he had his own global warming thing going: he was trying to change the interior climate we’d been used to our whole lives, the way we thought, the kinds of assumptions we made—assumptions about ourselves, the people close to us, the country.
