While touring Wisconsin last month, George W. Bush made an unscheduled stop at the Cady Cheese Factory, in Wilson, which turns out torpedoes of Colby and pepper Jack for machine-slicing at the deli counter. The candidate’s swing-state snack made Fox News, and the Times ran a wire photo showing Bush holding a platter of curds surrounded by half a dozen locals in hairnets.

“I’m sure it was bad cheese,” Jonathan White said the other day, at Bobolink Dairy, the two-hundred-acre farm on the New York-New Jersey border that he runs with his wife, Nina. The Whites are artisanal cheesemakers who believe that cows should live outside and eat grass. “We don’t buy them food, we don’t buy them medicine,” White said.

White, who is forty-eight and wears a beard, gets a twitch in his right cheek when he becomes agitated about the “microbiological destiny” of milk or the No Child Left Behind Act. “We felt that we had a big stake in the upcoming election,” he said. “But we’re not in a position to donate a lot of money. Then a light bulb flashed, and I remembered about Annie Proulx.”

Most fans of “The Shipping News” have not read “The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook.” But it was this 1982 work, co-written by Proulx, that taught White about Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural cheese. On a July morning in 1801, the citizens of Cheshire, Massachusetts, pooled their cows’ milk in the town’s cider press, producing a four-foot-wide, 1,235-pound wheel of cheese celebrating the Federalist defeat. That winter, as the cheese made a three-week journey by sleigh to the capital, crowds turned out to see it. The White House served the mammoth cheese, as it came to be known, on New Year’s Day, and for the next couple of years.

It wasn’t the last time a big cheese entered the White House. In 1835, a farmer in Oswego County, New York, honored Andrew Jackson with a fourteen-hundred-pound Cheddar. It sat, aging, in the White House lobby for two years before Jackson scheduled a levee, or public reception, on Washington’s birthday. Guests polished off the cheese in two hours. Friends of Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, hoped to make mammoth cheeses an annual tradition, but it ended abruptly after visitors ground curds into the East Room carpet. Still, at least one more got through: in 1928, Calvin Coolidge accepted a hundred-and-forty-seven-pound domestic Swiss cheese from Wisconsinites grateful for a heavy tariff he imposed on imports from Switzerland. The son of a Vermont cheese manufacturer, Coolidge maintained a private stash; in the afternoon, he would make cheese sandwiches for himself and his Secret Service detail.

Jonathan White, too, has brought cheese to the White House: he provisioned several of Clinton’s state dinners and taught a mozzarella workshop in the kitchen. So he decided to make a Kerry inaugural cheese. Rather than rallying the neighbors, he settled on something “grand in its concept, not in its physical size.” This past spring, the Whites acquired eight Kerry cattle, a rare heritage breed. “From 2000 B.C. to about 1960, they were the backbone of the Irish economy,” White said, standing in his milking barn. The Whites named the stocky black bull John, though he proved to be such an efficient breeder that they were tempted to rename him Bill.

White makes one wheel of Kerry cheese each day. Weighing just under three pounds, it lacks the populist appeal of its Presidential forebears, but White’s hands-on technique—no antibiotics, no heating or cooling—approximates Jefferson-era technology. “The fact is, the old way is easier, cheaper, makes better cheese, and is good for the soil,” he said.

White will keep making Kerry-milk cheeses this fall, and they will eventually be offered for sale at farmers’ markets and through the Bobolink Dairy Web site. If the Democrats prevail in November, White will telephone the White House chef, Walter Scheib, to offer him a ripe one for the inauguration. Early signs show that a Kerry inaugural cheese would be well received. When Teresa Heinz Kerry was served a locally produced Limburger sandwich on the campaign trail in Wisconsin she declared, “Cheese that doesn’t taste is just empty calories.”

Ultimately, however, the fate of the Kerry cheese is up to the voters. “If this turns out to be the Dewey inaugural cheese, well, we tried,” White said.