So when the Lone Star Iconoclast, a tiny weekly that bills itself as Bush's hometown paper, endorsed Democrat John Kerry, there was hell to pay.

Local businesses pulled their ads and banned the paper from their stores.

''We felt a little betrayed,'' said Larry Nelson, manager of the Crawford Country Style, a downtown shop that sells ''Luvya Dubya'' trinkets and other Bush memorabilia.

Most folks in Crawford (pop. 705) wholeheartedly support the re-election of the man whose ''Western White House'' made their speck on the map famous. Eighty-two percent voted for President Bush in 2000.

The paper's publisher, W. Leon Smith, said he never expected such a hostile response. He knew ''a person or two might pull an ad, that we might lose a subscriber or two.''

''But this has turned a little more vicious,'' said Smith, 51.

More than a dozen area businesses banded together to take out a two-page ad in a competing newspaper to endorse Bush, and all the stores in Crawford that sold the Iconoclast stopped.

Smith started the Iconoclast after Bush bought his ranch in Crawford. He began publishing the paper in late 2000, offering school news and plenty of pictures of Crawford Pirate sporting events. As the 2000 election's outcome was battled out in the courts, the new paper endorsed Bush.

But in the recent editorial, the Iconoclast said it supports Kerry and accused the president of having a ''smoke-screened agenda'' and leading the United States into a ''quagmire'' in Iraq on flimsy pretenses.

Smith, who co-wrote the editorial, said it gave a voice to a minority of Crawford residents who do not feel they can speak their minds without being ''pounced upon.''

To many in Crawford, though, the editorial was a slap in the face.