The cover story in the current Newsweek, “Finding His Faith” by Lisa Miller and Richard Wolffe, concerns Obama’s spirituality: what it is and how did he get it. The timing is good: there has been some hand-wringing on the part of some Democrats lately about his attempts to woo religious voters, and those who feel like they are losing their candidate to the land of the middle need a reality check. His religion has always been a cornerstone of his philosophy (though not the only one, unlike our current president who could only name one philosopher: Jesus H. Christ), and those voters of faith who are just now weighing their options need to know that, too.

If you’ve read his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, you know that young Obama was a seeker. This article rightly credits his openness to different religious approaches to his mother, who was something of a hippie. Aside from marrying the black guy and moving to Hawaii and Indonesia there is further proof of her hippieness in what Obama’s half-sister (she’s named Maya, for godsake!) says was Mom’s favorite spiritual text: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a collection of interviews Bill Moyers did with the Jungian teacher. True to her code, she took her kids to Christian churches and Buddhist temples, and young Barry kept an open mind throughout.

How this aspect of the candidate’s story plays may depend on the age of the voter, with younger ones more accepting than older, but scratch most people of faith of any age and you will find a past filled with doubt and questioning, seeking and, ultimately, more tolerance for different approaches than hardcore fundamentalists might allow. (Not to say the latter represent any kind of majority: The Newsweek piece cites a Pew Research survey that shows 70 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”) As important as mother Ann’s tolerance was to the senator’s own attitude, I think the absence of a father has much to do with his posture as well.

Obama’s father was an African Muslim who left when he was two years old. (That these facts alone have not prevented him from being the presumptive nominee of a major party says a lot about a more accepting America.) Mine left when I was somewhat older but I think his absence was more of an influence on my later life than his presence had been before. Not that he represented religious tenets; he had quit his Protestant faith just as my mother had abandoned Catholicism as soon as he left home. But without him around I had fewer boundaries, and one less person to ask for answers. As my brother Ethan said, “I didn’t have anyone around to show me the moon,” though sooner or later it finds the fortunate. Looking at it we see faces of our own imagining, drawn by our own longing.

John Edwards ran his presidential campaign into the ground talking about the two Americas of the rich and the poor that not enough people — certainly not enough rich people — wanted to hear about. It is part of the irony of wealth in America that most well-to-do people do not see themselves as such; their idea of a Sophie’s choice is trying to decide whether to give up the country house or the SUV. My God, we might actually have to give up both!

But there are another two Americas that exist in this great land, as made clear by the stink over this week’s New Yorker cover. You know, it depicts Obama and Michelle as a pair of Muslim jihadists and black liberation soldiers, burning flags and giving each other what a former Fox News anchor called a terrorist fist jab.

The illustration, by long time New Yorker illustrator Barry Blitt, drew immediate condemnation from Obama’s camp, John McCain, and now a slew of New York politicians have piled on as well, gathering outside Conde Nast’s offices today to demand an apology. “It was offensive to the values that New Yorkers have, it was offensive to the values that Americans have, and it is beyond just an insult,” said State Senator Bill Perkins.

All of which has left the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, puzzled. “The intention is to satirize not Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, but, in fact, to hold a pretty harsh light up to the rumors, innuendos, lies about the Obamas that have come up — that they are somehow insufficiently patriotic or soft on terrorism,” he told NPR today. His tone of bewilderment is notable; he seems to be saying, Isn’t it obvious that this is a joke? We’re the New Yorker. What, do you think anyone here is going to vote for John McCain?

This may be one of the few times that Remnick finds himself on the same side of an issue as a commentator at Fox News, who couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about either. Which brings me to my two Americas theory: The point that both Remnick and Fox seem to be making was that it was obvious, given its context, that this was supposed to be a joke. But I bet if you took that same illustration and put in on Page Six of the New York Post most of that paper’s readers would have thought: “I knew that Obama was a terrorist.”

Yes, I know that Murdoch has gushed over Obama, calling him a rock star, and the Post, his flagship US paper, has been more consistently fair to him than, say, the NY Daily News. (Fox News, which still seems to be searching for new ways to slag the candidate, is also owned by Murdoch, of course, and they must not have got the memo.) But its readers are, shall I say, less acquainted with the brand of satire and irony that the New Yorker trafficks in. And in a general election where all kinds of people who don’t actually read much of anything will decide the outcome of the race, another image — even a patently false and humorous one of Obama dressed like Osama — just adds to the ignorance pile. It’s another America than the one Remnick inhabits and they are not reading his magazine, let alone checking the fine print for the satire disclaimer.

Buried deep inside a report in the Washington Post today (“EPA Won’t Act on Emissions This Year”) was one of those sorts of Dickensian names familiar to fans of the Bush administration. Among the people trying to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from doing what the Supreme Court essentially mandated — ie, regulating gas emissions — was a fellow from Cheney’s office named Chase Hutto III.

Hutto is identified in the article as a Cheney energy adviser and, more to the point, a former intern at the CATO institute and a Bush campaign volunteer in the Florida recount of 2000. The GOP goon squad that descended on Florida in those days, best remembered for the “Brooks Brothers riot” in which they disrupted the Dade County recount and scared election officials away from doing their job, was filled with HItler youth types, whose principal credentials were loyalty to Bush. (Jim Wilkinson, who was instrumental in organizing the “riot” and other political pranks, went on to run press operations at CentCom before the invasion of Iraq.)

Hutto’s interest in matters related to energy come from his family; his grandfather patented at least seven piston inventions for the Ford Motor Company, and in the words of one of the participants at the meetings in which it was agreed that the EPA would take more time to study the effects of emissions (rather than actually doing anything), he has “an anti-regulatory philosophy and concern about what regulation means for the American way of life. He would talk, for example, about not wanting greenhouse gas controls to do away with the large American automobile.”

I wonder where he got that attitude.

I Googled Chase Hutto and didn’t find much: He has worked for Senator Spencer Abraham for years, starting in Abraham’s ’94 election campaign as “an opposition research consultant.” (This last gig no doubt appealed to Cheney, who has an appreciation for all practitioners of the dark art often simply called oppo.) His interests seem to be immigration and energy. And according to AP, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona in 2003. “Chase Hutto, a senior policy adviser for U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in Washington, D.C., said running with the bulls was a little scarier than working in politics. ‘Congressmen generally don’t charge, and their horns aren’t as sharp,’ he said.”

Indeed, Congress seem all but hornless these days, even as Bush’s popularity reaches record lows and Republicans look to the approaching shadow of an Obama presidency the same way the Orcs looked to the return of the wizard. The real news here, of course, is that even after the president signed an executive order directing the EPA to “take the first steps toward regulations” to reduce the nation’s gas usage by 20 percent over the next decade, he had low-level trolls working behind closed doors to thwart that directive. This troll just happened to have a funnier name than most.

If politics is theater then the general election is Broadway to the primaries off-Broadway (or off-off Broadway performance art of, say, Mike Gravel). Try-outs and previews are over, audiences have stood up and cheered, or at least not walked out, and the big money has been brought in to make sure this turkey doesn’t fold.

Comedy may be just as apt a metaphor. If the primary elections found candidates from both parties prowling the Iowa and New Hampshire equivalents of the Purple Onion (think HIllary Clinton as Phyllis Diller, Mike Huckabee as Bob Newhart, and Giuliani as Don Rickles) the general election is more like prime time and seeing how the presumptive nominees of each party handles the Family Hour is our new national pastime.

I caught another glimpse of McCain’s infamous green backdrop speech the other night — a tape that lives in infamy, since as public missteps of major candidates go it’s right up there with Nixon’s appearance in his first debate with JFK — and it occurred to me that McCain, who can actually be a funny guy, has transcended the sort of Lenny Bruce, black-humor mode of the early primary season (and 2000, when he famously referred to Arizona’s senior mecca Leisure World as “Seizure World”) and moved into an altogether more avant garde approach.

He reminded me of Andy Kaufman. If you remember Kaufman’s first historic appearance on SNL you’ll know what I mean. In the early days of that show, things really were improvised and often comics would come out and die. (The talented Franklyn Ajaye comes to mind.) Hardly anyone knew Kaufman then and when he told an elaborate joke in his Latka Gravas mode — eyes bugging, lips wet — many assumed he was really bombing, especially when he started to cry. It was only when he started to play the conga in time to his tears that we began to understand that we had entered Andy’s world.

So it was perhaps with McCain that fateful night. Yes, yes, I know there have been more shakeups inside his campaign meant to clean up his public performances, and whole articles are devoted to the man’s problems with the Tele-Prompter. But in his heart I suspect McCain may look at such outings — the frozen grin, the lame execution of such lame lines as “That’s not change we can believe in” — and smile in satisfaction. If I can’t be president, he seems to be saying, I’ll give them something to remember. Look for Elvis impersonations and lady-wrestling next.

Obama, meanwhile, has leap-frogged over the whole comedy circuit to the big stage (a very big stage in Denver). As much as Republicans scream about how smooth he is, he just gets smoother, deftly handling the net left who don’t like his centrist approach while reminding reporters new to covering him that he’s always been less reliably liberal than he is portrayed. To McCain’s Kaufman he is Johnny Carson, telling America with his very posture to stay cool. I half expect him to swing an invisible golf club in the direction of Doc and the band. And all the other comedians (ie, politicians) on the Democratic side — and even a Republican or two — are making nice. They know that you don’t cross Johnny. For the foreseeable future, it’s his show.

A story in the Times this morning reveals that the US military learned the “coercive management techniques it used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from the Chinese. Yes, sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint and exposure were all gags used on American servicemen during the Korean War and they copied them not merely because they admired them but because they worked. By making GIs stand in extreme cold, say, for long periods of time the Chinese were able to elicit confessions from them. Problem was they confessed to things they didn’t necessarily do.

Lest you think that this fine point was hidden somewhere, the chart of fun things to do to bad people that the military used against a select number of Gitmo prisoners (before these methods were banned in 2005) came from an 1957 Air Force study entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” — false as in untrue. Bad intelligence and bad karma.

There have been many incidents of us becoming the thing we profess to hate since 9.11 but few more glaring than this. After all, our ideas of Chinese torture come mostly from movies like The Manchurian Candidate, in which a group of soldiers captured while on patrol in Korea are brainwashed to kill each other. Many a college student has been reminded of the negative effects of sleep deprivation while in the midst of finals, and has paused to wonder just what kind of people could sink so low.

Here, use my mirror.

These weren’t the only techniques the military trainers were pushing; “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings” had some great effects, including “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.” While Bush apologists will say that this was a ticking-bomb situation, and torturing these combatants saved untold American lives, that ticking sound might actually be from our own morality going down the drain. As the Times notes, “Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.”

Proving, once again, that these methods produce results, just as surely as sin begets damnation.