Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. "Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

Ruben Dican adjusts the television, as everyone waits. A picture comes into focus. It's Bryant Gumbel. There's a shot of United Flight 175 ramming the south tower. Then it's run again. And again. It is Sept. 12, and 22 men, women and children sit, rapt, at the end of the earth. They've never actually seen a skyscraper. Or a Bryant Gumbel. Or a plane, other than the tiny ones that infrequently alight on a grassy strip near the volcano.