Chico proves something of an oasis from the rural expanse, a SimCity version of a college town, home to Chico State University, plopped down in the middle of agricultural California. There are coffee bars and Internet cafes, boutique clothing stores and tattoo parlors peopled by residents wearing hemp necklaces, Birkenstocks, fraternity shirts and nose rings. It's the only part of Butte County where Democrats outnumber Republicans.

It seems an unlikely place to become notorious for spouting the anti-Semitic thoughts of Middle America -- the sentiments pundits thought might be festering in the nation's extreme outposts after Al Gore named Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who is Jewish, as his running mate.

Gore's pick caused many American Jews to simultaneously cheer and fear what would come next. Then, on Aug. 23, seemingly on cue, someone entered the Chico offices of the local Democratic Party (a volunteer had failed to lock the door) and scribbled "No Jew in the White House" across a dry-erase board. The event made headlines from here to Jerusalem.

But after I walked into that barren office, nestled next to an old abandoned movie theater at the end of Main Street, and saw the graffiti on the dry-erase board, the words still untouched, the incident didn't exactly seem worthy of national attention. I'm Jewish, and yet my initial reaction to the nearly illegible scrawl in green marker was to scratch my head and wonder where the controversy was.

But it turns out the incident was not an isolated one. Last weekend, after the graffiti had already been publicized, messages reading "Kill the Jew" were found written around town, on a park bench and at a local laundromat, according to local authorities. The Chico police do not believe the markings are related, but they have captured the attention (and, perhaps, the imagination) of local Democrats.

"It's showing up all over the city," says Bob Ray, the Democratic Party's local field director. Ray is 32, a student at Chico State with a surfer-friendly, Jeff Spicoli air about him. He responds to questions about the incidents with enthusiastic disdain. "It would be my guess that it's a small group of Neanderthals that for some reason got focused on this."

But couldn't the graffiti also be the work of some dumb kid, whose desire for notoriety gets fanned every time the media covers one of his stunts? Jonathan Bernstein, director of the Northern California chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, says the incident should be taken seriously. "Generally there's a tendency to shrug these things off as a youthful prank, but there's a real danger in that," he said. "Youth are responsible for a large portion of horrific hate crime in this country. Neo-Nazi skinheads are made up of youth, and they're responsible for 50 murders in the last eight or nine years, as well as thousands of stabbings and desecrations. So we don't want to easily just dismiss it as a prank."

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