Corn has the perfect Midwestern name for the red "flyover country" that is mocked by the Blue America elites. He's also one reason Bush won Ohio and the election.

To understand why, you need to know terms such as "voter flush," "micro-targeting," and "personal voter contact."

They were all happening Tuesday afternoon at the Bush-Cheney headquarters in a storefront on Seventh Street.

It was highly organized chaos. Pizza boxes, Halloween candy, rubber bands and Sharpie boxes littered the few square inches of tables that were not jammed with volunteers, huddled elbow-to-elbow, talking to likely voters like air-traffic controllers trying to bring Air Force One in for a safe landing.

They call it GOTV - Get Out The Vote. After years of getting smoked on Election Day by union-label phone banks, the Republicans finally took apart the Democratic Party machine and rebuilt it, new and improved.

It works like this: During the final four days, Bush-Cheney volunteers in Hamilton County made more than 100,000 phone calls. They were not dumb-bomb "lit drops" of fliers to paper a neighborhood. That's old school. GOTV calls were smart bombs, guided with GPS accuracy.

"The key is personal voter contacts," said Alex Trantafilou, vice chairman of Hamilton County Bush-Cheney 2004. "We made 2 million voter contacts in Ohio over the last 96 hours."

Doorknockers were given books of names on the same street, showing the breakdown of Rs and Ds at each house.

Then on Tuesday, field teams scrambled to polling places for public postings of people who had voted. Those were called in to teams of college students who sat on the floor, deleting those voters from a database in hand-held PDAs. The updates were then downloaded to PCs, to print new lists for callers to "flush out" anyone who had not voted yet.

Trantafilou believes his eager army of unpaid volunteers gave Republicans a big edge over Democratic field workers who were paid by the hour.

Fox News proved him right at 12:40 a.m., by calling Ohio for Bush - based on GOP turnout in Hamilton County that offset Kerry votes in Cleveland. NBC called Ohio for Bush 15 minutes later.

"One guy knocked on 500 doors and worked 12 hours a day," Trantafilou said. That guy was Doug Corn. He worked 9 to 9 for nearly a week. Unpaid. At financial cost to his business. And although he's a Bush "Ranger" who raised more than $200,000 in donations, it was his first time in the trenches.

"The core values Bush holds are very important to me," he explained. "It's a matter of his integrity. He has shown great respect for the office after the Clinton years."

At 3 p.m., when ridiculously flawed exit polls had Kerry winning the election and many Republicans were ready to walk "four more years" in their loser shoes, I asked him how he would handle a defeat.

"I will be very disappointed," he said after a long pause. "But very respectful of our new president." After that, he found it hard to talk. "I'm sorry, you got me very emotional."

Doug Corn is not just a symbol of Midwestern Bush voters and the way they won Ohio - he's also a model of the way all of us should behave.

Play hard, but show respect for the winner - and never forget how it hurts to lose.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.