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ELECTION GUIDE...6 p.m. (Eastern Time) Polls close in: Kentucky, Indiana Total electoral votes at stake: 20 of 538 Conventional wisdom watch: Bush takes both. Key story line: Bush's margin in Kentucky. Barnes: "Indiana is always Republican. Watch Kentucky. Bush is running ahead, between 5 and 9 points, and it's a state he has to win. If he doesn't win, you'll know he's in trouble. Vice versa, if Bush wins by a good margin, he may be on track."

7 p.m. Polls close in: Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Virginia and Vermont Total electoral votes at stake: 66 of 538 Key story line: All eyes on Florida. Kondracke: "If Florida goes Gore, you've got the psychology of the night. The story line becomes: How does Bush possibly win? That's dynamite."

7:30 p.m. Polls close in: North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia Total electoral votes at stake: 40 of 538 Conventional wisdom watch: Three for Bush. Barnes: "West Virginia is a Democratic state that suddenly turned. The gun issue and the environmental issues have hurt Gore here. If Bush wins it - and he should - he's taken one of the tossups."

8 p.m. Polls close in: Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee Total electoral votes at stake: 170 of 538 Conventional wisdom watch: The tight three: Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania. Key story line: Does Gore take all three tossups? What will Tennessee do? Blitzer: "My gut tells me that when the East Coast closes, we're going to know what's happening. If Gore takes Michigan, New Jersey and Florida, it's really hard for Bush to get to 270. Bush will put up big numbers in the South and West, but it's going to be very hard for him to win the electoral vote without Florida and Michigan. On the other hand, Illinois and New Jersey are both expected to go for Gore. If they don't, Gore is in deep trouble. If Gore carries all those states, it's over."

8:30 p.m. Polls close in: Arkansas Total electoral votes at stake: 6 of 538 Key story line: Can Clinton carry Arkansas for Gore?

9 p.m. Polls close in: Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming Total electoral votes at stake: 134 of 538 Conventional wisdom watch: Bush out West, Gore in the East Key story line: The Nader vote in Minnesota and Wisconsin Barnes: "This is where we'll get the first indication of Nader support: whether he can get 5 percent, and whether he's the margin of victory for Bush." Kondracke: "If Bush wins Wisconsin, he'll have a substantial victory. If Bush takes Minnesota, it's a blowout." Blitzer: "Nader adds a real element of uncertainty."

10 p.m. Polls close in: Iowa, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Utah Total electoral votes at stake: 23 of 538 Key story line: Battleground states may get called this hour - 270 looms.

11 p.m. Polls close in: California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington Total electoral votes at stake: 76 of 538 Conventional wisdom: Nader raiding votes out West as Bush makes California a little more competitive than expected. But is it over?

12 a.m. Polls close in: Alaska Total electoral votes at stake: 3 of 538 Key story line: Has Dan Rather gone over 270 crazy metaphors? --Hartford Courant, 11/7/00

FIRST, "nearly everyone gets a tax cut—particularly the wealthiest third of taxpayers. The long-term effect is cloudy: Bush argues that his cuts will encourage the economy to keep growing, but the cuts could lead to inflation, and if things turn sour, ballooning deficits could return. And Congress is currently spending a fifth of the surplus." Bush plans to spend this $1.3 trillion before the projected surplus money comes in to pay for it, meaning if the projected surplus is less, other programs would be cut or we would go into the red. Either way, it's an extra benefit for the wealthy.

AND, "abortion will probably remain legal, but with more limitations. Vouchers for religious schools could be found constitutional, and the court could allow some prayer in schools. Affirmative action may be struck down or further limited, as could many federal laws that encroach upon state power, such as the Clean Air and Water Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act." Corporations would be given greater protections against consumers and privacy protections would be weakened.

FURTHER, "a patients' bill with such a limited right to sue keeps lawsuits from driving costs up but leaves patients little recourse if HMOs don't play fair. Privatizing Medicare will help cure its long-term financial troubles, but it risks creating a class system: full coverage for wealthy and low-income seniors, while those in the middle struggle to afford plans with prescription coverage." There is no guarantee that privatizing medicare will help cure its long-term financial troubles, since for-profit insurance companies would take over meaningful government oversight, further weakening the role of doctor-patient health decisions.

ALSO, "national educational standards give way to local and state testing requirements. Reading takes center stage in classrooms. Public schools could suffer as vouchers shift money to private and parochial schools." A new educational bureaucracy will be established to set up the reward-punishement aspect of the system, but no meaningful federal oversight of state self-evaluations is anticipated.

AND, EPA's power wanes as bulk of environmental decision-making shifts to state legislators. U.S. unlikely to enter into environmental pacts with international community or recognize universal calls for reduction of greenhouse gases." More emphais is placed upon the Texas pattern of jawboning for-profit corporations into initiating costly environmental protections.

FINALLY, the $2 trillion plus price tag for social security means the program may go bankrupt 20 years earlier; to cover the cost, Bush will have to cut benefits. The stock market is slowing down and there's no benefit floor to protect the losers. The source of $1 trillion of the $2 trillion is unaccounted for, meaning that it will come out of the surplus, a fifth of which has already been spent.

THE BOTTOM LINE. Rounding numbers off, with the estimated surplus at $4.3 trillion and $0.9 trillion spent, there are $3.4 trillion left. Rather than a pay as you go plan, Bush wants to return $1.3 trillion in tax cuts before even knowing if the projected surplus numbers are correct. This creates two scenarios, neither of which is good. In the first bad scenario, the projected surplus figures are correct. Bush deducts $1.3 trillion in tax cuts up front from $3.4 trillion left in the projected budget, leaving $2.1 trillion. Deducting Bush's $2 trillion social security promise leaves a deficit of $0.1 trillion. This means that all of Bush's other plans are created through deficit spending: education, the military, and defense weaponry, for example, which rounds off to a $1 trillion deficit. This is the best possible scenario. Much too much for the benefit of a joke and a beer in return. You don't even want to think about the other bad scenario, which is more likely. The budget predictions are overly optimistic, Bush spends the money up front in the form of taxes, coupled with what Congress has already spent. We go trillions in the hole, leading to heavy deficit spending, poorly funded social programs, higher healthcare expenses, an earlier social security crash, and higher interest rates. --Politex, 11/6/00, quotations from TIME, 11/6/00

Dear Politex:

Here it is, election day, and I can't stop thinking about something Bush said recently. You'll remember it, of course: presented with his failure to disclose his drunk-driving arrest, Bush said that he had done so because he wanted to be a "positive role model" for his daughters. It's really a rather startling view into the heart of Bush's politics, isn't it? Bush stood in front of national reporters and said, in effect, that he believes that living a lie is not simply understandable but, in fact, admirable--if the point of the lie is to make the children believe that their parents are better than they truly are. This isn't just a case of "the end justifying the means." It is the most hair-raising example I've ever come across of a parent stating that his children are so shallow their morality would collapse under the weight of truth. Does Bush really think this, you wonder, or does he simply need his children to look at him with uncomplicated hero-worship in their eyes? Do his vaunted "family values" boil down, in the end, to nothing but the insistence that the family function as a fun-house mirror, designed to reflect its husband and father at twice his actual size?

A colleague of mine told me the other day that she will be voting for Bush, because the country needs a "moral leader." As I have gotten way too tired of asking people what it is in Bush's conduct they find "moral," I decided to switch tactics and ask, simply, why we need the President to be a "moral leader." I pointed out that there is no shortage of ministers, rabis, imams, scout leaders, gurus, advice columnists, and street-corner scolds in this country freely available to those who feel the lack of moral "leadership" in their lives. Why the President? Because, said my colleagues, what the pastors say won't "stick" unless the President takes it seriously, too. And since what the President does is always in the news, the President has to be moral so the press won't fill our TV screens with talk about scandals, which in turn destroys the moral teachings we are trying to give our children.

So Bush isn't alone. His supporters appear to share his hideous view of their own children as moral houses of cards, ready to collapse at the slightest gust. They appear to recognize the shallowness of their own "moral teachings," which can be undermined at a stroke once it is acknowledged that even grownups fall short at times. Those of us who manage to wrestle with our consciences and avoid killing other people, or trying to, without regard to what the President does or did, are asked to step aside, morally speaking, so that those incapable of any moral depth may have uplifting Presidential coverage on CNN. These are the same people who tell me they're "sick of cynicism." No wonder they're sick of it. They're drowning in it.

Next week I am going to be--gasp!--39 years old. In Bushspeak, that means I have another year left of my "youth," in which any and all lapses may be forgiven, as long as I wake up on November 15, 2001 and become a born-again moralistic prig committed to the idea that no punishment is too draconian for poor and minority children (ages 0-40) who do the same damn things I did, but had the misfortune to be profiled by my cops. I have one more year to live a complicated life, before I can rewrite it all into the simple-minded script of hokey redemption. I have one more year before I can decide that what Jenna and Barbara Bush know about is more important than what the children of the drug war see on their way to prison. I have one more year of total privacy in which to do whatever I damn well please, in sure and certain hope of redemption by self-promotion later on. --Doris, 11/7/00

...After listening to George W. Bush for almost a year as he campaigned throughout our 50 states, watching him in the three debates with Vice President Gore, and reading parts of the three biographies written about him as well as his own autobiography, it can honestly be said that significant numbers of the American electorate are still trying to figure out what his qualifications for taking on the most powerful office in the free world might be. We have no such problem with Al Gore. Like him or dislike him, we have a much better idea what kind of man we would have in the White House should he be elected next week. After all, he has been in elective public office for some 24 years, first as a congressman and then as a U.S. senator from Tennessee, and for the past eight years as vice president. We are familiar with his passions and his goals, and he is never at a loss to give us the details about his policy proposals - which be does "ad nauseam," according to his detractors. His specifics on economic policy for a "Gore Administration" run to about 200 pages, defining what he considers his ten most important goals, including among them the following: cutting poverty to an all-time low; eliminating federal debt by 2012; doubling the number of families with substantial savings; raising home ownership from its current 67 percent to 70 percent of the population by 2004, and college attendance rates from 66 percent to 75 percent by 2010.

We have no similar record to look at for Governor Bush during the 1970s and 1980s, when Al Gore was honing his skills as a legislator in both the House and the Senate. Actually, during the '70s and part of the '80s, Bush was almost totally involved in a series of oil-drilling ventures, all of which eventually lost money heavily, though providing handsome tax write-offs for, investors, including Bush. As author Bill Minutaglio tells us in his biography, "First Son: G.W Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty," George's Uncle Jonathan knew that actually finding oil was not all that important "in those days, it behooved you to drill," Jonathan Bush told Minutaglio. "You don't have to do terribly well in order to do well because you get so many write-offs. So it was an attractive way to invest money and save taxes." According to Elizabeth Mitchell, author of "W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty," practically everything Bush touched in the oil business turned to ashes, yet he always emerged unscathed.

He took some time off from the oil business in 1988 to help in his father’s campaign for the presidency. Shortly after the election, he returned to Texas and was recruited as a partner in the consortium to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team. With his father in the White House, the family name helped him to become a sort of regular mascot to the team, sitting in the Rangers' dugout for almost eight years as a kind of official cheerleader for the investors. On an initial investment of $600,000, be eventually sold his share in the Rangers for $15 million. A decided improvement over oil-well drilling for tax write-offs! Is it any wonder that in 1990, when Bush started thinking about running for governor of Texas, the condition of his employment résumé since graduating from college was a matter of some concern to the Texas Republican hierarchy whose support he was courting? Purchase of the Rangers had been designed to increase George's visibility in Texas, so that he could follow his father’s path into local politics. As early as 1978 he had run for congress from a Lubbock- Midland district and lost to a Democrat, Kent Hance. The Rangers period had done its work in making him a household name throughout the entire state of Texas. But had it added any stature to his character, any gravitas to his political persona? On the contrary, his biographer tells us that when he disclosed his ambition to run for governor to friends and members of the Texas State Republican organization, the response was anything but cordial. His biographer, Bill Minutaglio, tells us that a female Republican pollster laid it on the line to him this way: "George, everybody likes you, but you haven't done anything. You need to go out in the world and do something, the way your father did when he left Connecticut and the protection of his family. You just haven't done shit. You're a Bush and that’s all."

It goes without saying that Bush put that kind of talk pretty much to rest by his successful campaign for the governorship in 1994 and his even more successful re-election in 1998. His claim that his five years as governor of Texas qualifies him to be president of the most powerful nation in the world rests solely on his performance as governor. So let’s take a brief look at the quality and character of the Bush administration of the state of Texas in the past five years. To begin with, it should be remembered that the office of governor of Texas is constitutionally a relatively weak job - compared to many other states. The powers of the governor are shared by both the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house. The legislature is the real power in Texas, so the speaker can exert almost as much power in Texas as the governor ... except of course, for the power of the governor's veto and the executive powers of the state police. We learn from his biographers that the governor runs his office on a leisurely nine to five basis; that he doesn't like meetings to last more than 15 minutes; prefers that memoranda be presented to him on one sheet of paper; and is a great believer – and practitioner – of the five day week. And one of his biographers, Elizabeth Mitchell, tells us that Bush has frequently spent many an afternoon playing solitaire on his computer in his office.In a review of the Bush biography "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W Bush” by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, we are told that "In view of his background, it is not surprising to find that Bush has been a protector of big business, championing laws that make it harder to sue corporations and protecting his state's polluting industries from environmental regulations. Ivins calls him punitive toward welfare recipients and oblivious of children's health needs. "In straightforward, non-bureaucratic English, because he is running for president, George Bush attempted to (1) bar 200,000 children from a low-cost federal-state health-insurance program, and (2) discourage poor children from receiving free health care to which they are entitled under federal law."

Of primary importance to many Americans would be Bush's cozy relationship with the National Rifle Association, his devotion to the death penalty, and his early sponsorship (immediately following his election to the governorship in 1995) of the Texas Concealed Handgun Law. Several weeks ago a loose lipped official of the NRA said that "if George Bush becomes president the NRA will have a special office at the White House." This was immediately denied by both the NRA and the Bush campaign leaders, but it continues to be repeated in the popular press. The fact that 131 convicted criminals have been executed in Texas during the five years of Bush's governorship (the largest number of executions in any of the 50 states) is shocking to many Americans, whether or not they are in favor or opposed to the death penalty. What shocks them is what they feel may be the relationship between the number of executions and the Concealed Handgun Law that Bush signed in 1995. Following the passage of this law, Bush signed a law expanding the 1995 law to allow Texas residents to carry concealed weapons in churches and hospitals unless those institutions expressly prohibit weapons on their premises. And, just last year, the governor signed a law making it extremely difficult for cities in Texas to bring lawsuits against gun manufacturers. The NRA’s justification for carrying concealed handguns is: "An armed society is a polite society." Bush claims that the new law has made Texas a safer place. Unfortunately, a new study released last August by The Violence Policy Center confirms that the 1995 Texas statute is not a crime deterrent but a dangerous threat to public safety. The study, "License to Kill: The Texas Concealed Handgun Law's Legacy of Crime and Violence" shows a side you won't hear about from George Bush and the NRA. The study, which used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, reported that Texas concealed handgun license holders were arrested for a total of 3,370 crimes between January 1, 1996 and April 30, 2000. The crimes included murder, rape, sexual assault and weapons-related charges! In the course of the past ten months of his campaign, Bush has not only claimed that his new 1995 law granting permission to Texas residents to carry concealed handguns has made Texas a safer place, he has said many times, when queried about the high number of executions he has approved, that he is "totally confident" that every one of those executed were, in fact, guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. Such claims for the purity of the Texas judicial system were just refuted by a new report issued last week by the Texas Defender Service, a non-profit organization partly financed by the American Bar Association. The study found that "an intolerably high number of people are being sentenced to death and propelled through the appellate courts in a process that lacks the integrity to reliably identify the guilty or meaningfully distinguish those among them who deserve a sentence of death. The system is plagued with problems from the beginning to its irreversible end. At the trial level there are problems with incompetent and otherwise impaired defense lawyers, including some who are unable to stay sober and some who are incapable of staying awake. The study noted one case in which the defendant was represented at trial by an attorney who ingested cocaine on the way to trial and consumed alcohol during court breaks. The defendant was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death.

The idea that Governor Bush can express "total confidence" that every one of the 131 persons executed in the past five years was definitely guilty shows that he is either hopelessly naive, or, more likely, in a state of self-induced denial. In fact, the Texas Defender Study described above is titled, "A State of Denial: Texas Justice and the Death Penalty." In this connection, the distinguished correspondent for The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristoff, wrote last week from Austin, Texas that "Governor George W. Bush has written that ‘by far the most profound’ decision he or any governor can make is whether to proceed with an execution. ‘I get the facts, weight them thoughtfully and carefully, and decide,’ Mr. Bush wrote in his autobiography. What he did not say is that he normally does this in 15 minutes." Kristoff continues in the same article last week, "It is impossible to know clearly what a Bush presidency would be like from his years as governor, in part because Mr. Bush has held office for just five years and has never been tested by a recession or other crisis. But his experience here in Austin can help form some tentative ideas about how he might operate as president. The 900-page stack of Mr. Bush's schedules and correspondence obtained from the governor's office show that Mr. Bush typically had his first office meeting about 9 a.m., took two hours of "private time" at lunch for a run, and then wrapped up his last meeting about 5 p.m. A large portion of the officially scheduled meetings were, "photo opportunities," interviews with reporters, or meetings with school groups or other ceremonial occasions. Relatively little of the day was devoted to hard-core examination of the issues." We could go on in the same vein if space permitted, but do we really have to? A Washington journalist put it in a succinct sentence as far back as January 26th of this year: Bush's biggest vulnerability as he seeks the White House is that the more you look at him the less you see...." David K. Eishler. Reprinted from Chestnut Hill Local, Thursday, November 2, 2000, Philadelphia, PA