There's still time to get a bet down on Alan Keyes.

What you should know about exit polls. Courtesy of the Mystery Pollster.

Okay, the October Surprise was that there was no October Surprise. It's starting to look like the November Surprise is that if you go to vote, you'll still be in line when it comes time for the December Surprise.

In the midst of all this election talk and a killer deadline I had to meet, I somehow managed to miss noting the death of Vaughn Meader, the man who played John F. Kennedy on what was at the time, the fastest-selling record album ever. That The First Family was a comedy album made that even more remarkable. And of course, it is remarkable how short-lived was Mr. Meader's tour of duty as a comedian. When J.F.K. died, so did the career of his impersonator. It is said that the first time Lenny Bruce took the stage following the Kennedy Assassination, his opening line was either, "Phew! Vaughn Meader!" or "Poor Vaughn Meader," depending on which version you believe. (More vulgar permutations of the line have also been quoted.)

A couple of things should be noted about The First Family. One, which obituaries like this one did not make clear, is that Meader did not write or even conceive the album. Writer-producers Earle Doud and Bob Booker did. Meader was just the actor they hired to play Kennedy. He was one of several young performers around who were then doing impersonations of the Chief Exec, and he was the one Doud and Booker selected.

Another thing that should be noted is that, for all its success, The First Family was not very good and not very memorable, nor were its sequels and many imitators, many of which were also by Doud and/or Booker. Everyone bought the album but I doubt very many listened to it a second time. It was a fad and not a very long one, at that. I suspect that even if Kennedy had not been shot, Meader's career would have taken the same trajectory, albeit slower. He tried a few non-Kennedy albums later and they're just as unlistenable as The First Family.

The most interesting thing about the whole album is that it existed…and in so doing, it knocked down a lot of taboos relating to political comedy in this country. Initially, record companies were afraid of it, especially ABC Records, which rejected it on the advice of Jim Hagerty, an executive with the firm. Hagerty had worked as Dwight Eisenhower's press secretary and he thought the whole idea of mocking the President of the United States was just this side of treason. But the small company that finally put it out had very little to lose, and when Kennedy himself gave it a boost by (reportedly) being a good sport and playing it for his friends, the thing took off. Thereafter, its sheer financial success endorsed the propriety of lampooning politicians, and established the market for it. That, I think, is the enduring legacy of Vaughn Meader. And since I believe mocking politicians is a noble pastime, I think that's a darn good legacy.

And now, less than three hours after moving Florida into Bush's column, the Slate electoral cartographers have moved it back to Kerry and also shifted Wisconsin to Bush, so they have the election tied at 269-269…possibly the most chilling outcome possible.

None of this is because potential voters are changing their minds. It's because different polls are being announced in different orders, and the prognosticators are treating teensy fluctuations like they mean something.

This is real silly. The Slate folks even say, "…if you don't like that projection, just wait an hour." Part of me would like to chug-a-lug about six bottles of Nyquil and wake up when all this is over. I'm just afraid six bottles would only get me about three days into the recounts.

The silliness of watching the electoral maps today is driven home by what William Saletan (usually, one of my favorite political commentators) is doing over on Slate. For some reason, he and his staff have taken the position that there's no such thing as a state too close to call; that every state must be awarded to Bush or Kerry, no matter how ambiguous the polls are. So last night, he had Kerry winning with 299 electoral votes. This morning, he moved Ohio and Florida from Kerry to Bush, so Bush is now winning with 286. This may be great for driving traffic to their website but a pretty good argument can be made that it's just exploiting microscopic shifts of polls — some of them, less trustworthy than others — that are all well within the margins of error. In his accompanying notes, he doesn't seem to even think the shifts represent anything significant…but he recolors the map, all the same.

Again, it helps to look back at the 2000 election. A lot of these polls missed predicting the final vote in some states by 3 or 4 points, sometimes more. And today, we're looking at electoral projection maps that award a state to a candidate if he's a tenth of a point ahead in those same polls. Why is it so tough to say that the numbers indicate that either Kerry or Bush could win Ohio or Florida or any of about a half-dozen other states?

Yeah, I know. It's something to do the day before the election. As pundit Jack Germond once said, "We aren't paid to say 'I don't know,' so we have to say something whether we know or not."

My sense is that you can look at this thing two ways. If you take polls as literally as polls ought to be taken — which is to say, as probable not definite gauges — then Bush is a slight favorite. And if you look at the emotion out there and the mobilization of ground forces tomorrow, Kerry has a slight advantage. I think folks on both sides who are fantasizing about landslides are kidding themselves.

Right now, I'm less scared over who will win than I am over how messy it will be with all the charges of vote stealing and vote suppression and machines that misrecord your selections. This past weekend, we turned back the clocks and they said it was the longest night of the year. Just wait 'til tomorrow evening if you want to see a long night.

I'll not insult your intelligence by thinking I can convince you at this late date to vote my way…or that you need me to remind you to go vote at all. I will suggest that if you go vote Tuesday, you prepare yourself for a very long line at the polling place. I think we're about to see a record turnout, to the extent that polls will be ordered to remain open long after the official closing times. The fact that many of them will also be cluttered with observers and cameramen and exit pollsters will further add to the chaos, and make many of us think we were lunkheads for not going the absentee route.

Unless the exit polls indicate some tremendous landslide, I doubt we'll know who won on Tuesday evening. Certainly, there will be whole precincts where the machines go kablooey or the ballots mysteriously don't line up with the candidates or even show all their names, and you'll see people swearing they touched the button for Bush but the machine registered a vote for Michael Dukakis…or something. Whatever, it's going to be messy.

Maybe it's just me, but I sure get the impression that the pollsters — the non-partisan ones, at least — are a lot less sure of their projections this year than usual. An unprecedented number of ballots…more new registered voters than usual…technological changes like cell phones and early voting and so forth…if I were a pollster, I'd sure think this was a good time to not go too far out on a limb. These folks deal in models that are based in part on previous elections, and we've never had an election quite like this one. Perhaps their surveys really are calling it this close to 50-50, but there may also be a little "playing it safe" in there.

For some reason, I was reminded today of the joke about Hubert Humphrey in 1968 when he was running against Nixon. He and his wife actually went to bed before the results were all in and — and this part begins the joke — he turned to her and said, "Well, Muriel. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you'll get to make love with the president-elect of the United States." The next morning, she woke him up and asked, "How does this work? Do I go to Dick's house or does he come over here?"

Someone wrote me and asked, "If Bush wins another four years, who or what will you think was responsible?" In that event, I'd blame the entire Democratic Party for even fielding a candidate. Because if Bush ran unopposed, he'd lose for sure.

Never mind the election. Let's talk about important stuff. Let's talk about TiVo.

Since Jay, Dave and Conan were all in reruns last week, I seized the opportunity to have my office TiVo upgraded. On Wednesday, I took it in to a company called Weaknees and on Thursday, I went by and they handed it back to me. When it went in, it had a maximum capacity (on the slowest speed) of 80 hours. Now, at Basic Quality, I get 322 hours and 18 minutes.

I found Weaknees by asking about on some TiVo-oriented Internet forums. Their main stock-in-trade is selling kits with which you can upgrade your TiVo at home with very little technical expertise. I could probably have bought one and done the conversion myself but since the Weaknees office happens to be not far from my home — and since I'm busy and they'll do the installation for fifty bucks — I decided to let them handle it. Their website, as you'll see, explains the process in a pretty clear manner…and the site's also chock full of info about TiVos and how they work and what to do when they don't.

The neat thing here, beyond the fact that I can now record every stupid show I could ever want to watch, is that my TiVo is reborn…but it's still the same one with the same lifetime subscription. As you surely know, a TiVo requires a sub to the TiVo service and that will run you (currently) $12.95 per month or $299 for the life of the machine. I bought the latter…but that means that when this TiVo wears out and needs to be replaced, I'll have to buy a new subscription. The TiVo upgrade I had done installs two new hard disks and since that's the part most likely to wear out on the machine, I have an almost-new machine which continues the old sub. So far, I'm very happy.

In other electronics news around my house: My favorite digital camera is my Nikon Coolpix 990 — it's the one I use for all those fabulous raccoon pics — or at least, it was my favorite. Today, I found that a tab on the battery compartment has broken off, making it impossible to close the door…which makes it impossible to use the camera. A quick search of our beloved Internet yields the info that this happens an awful lot on the Coolpix 990 — a design flaw that has been corrected on later models. And of course, it's one of those design flaws that usually doesn't show up until the thing is out of warranty. Lovely. I'm told Nikon will fix it if I ship them the camera and $150 and wait a few months to get it back…and there's no guarantee that little tab won't snap off again. You can imagine how happy I am about this.

Michael Kinsley makes a good point. Right now, this election is about a lot of trivia and it looks like it's going to be very close. But as soon as one guy wins, it's going to be about a mandate for the winner and the rejection of the loser's entire existence.

One other thought on the new Osama tape and one "by the way"…

We've heard a lot of low, contrived attacks during this election but I don't think any are as desperate and as lacking in reality as, "The terrorists want to see [name of candidate] to win." Who the hell knows who they would like to see win the presidency? Or even if they care? One would tend to think that where the rulers of America are viewed as the spawns of Satan, the characterization applies to anyone — Bush or Kerry — who is not prepared to utterly reverse decades of U.S. policy.

For that matter, even if video analysis of the tape showed that Osama was wearing a Bush-Cheney button or a Kerry-Edwards lapel pin, what would that mean? He could be hoping for the election of a given ticket because he thinks that administration is more likely to pull U.S troops out of the lands he holds sacred. Or he could be rooting for those candidates because he thinks they're more likely to do something so egregiously destructive that it will further unite the Arab world against us. He could even come out for the candidate he likes less because he thinks that will drive American voters to the other guy. My guess is he doesn't care who's in the White House any more than we care who Al Qaeda names Employee of the Month.

I mean, if he cared, he could have said something that really sank one guy or the other…like, "I hope you Americans will vote for my old business partner, Dick Cheney — oh, and Dick, thank the Halliburton boys for that new, secret shipment of weapons." Or "I hope you Americans will vote for John Kerry because he has secretly assured me that he will arrange for flying lessons for my men if we'll promise to destroy the Del Monte ketchup factory!"

The issues in this election are pretty clear. It's amazing how many people are trying to drag in ambiguous, arguable points like which candidate the terrorists would prefer.

Here's the by-the way: By the way, the first TV coverage I saw of the Osama tape happened to be a CBS News Special Report anchored by Dan Rather. I suppose all the initial reports said something about how the footage had not been verified so it was possible it was not Bin Laden or was not what it was purported to be. But Rather must have said that twenty times in about ten minutes. Every sentence included a disclaimer that the tape had not been verified, that they were not saying that the man in the tape was definitely Osama, etc. Guess someone at CBS said to someone else, "Dan, for God's sake. We got hung out to dry over some bogus letters…try not to totally humiliate us if this tape turns out to be phony."

Last year, the Animation Writers Caucus of the Writers Guild foolishly bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award to the proprietor of this website. This year, they've come to their senses and they're giving it to Jack Mendelsohn.

I first knew Jack's name from a brilliant, short-lived Sunday-only newspaper strip that he wrote and drew from 1959 to 1960, Jacky's Diary. It was funny but a lot of people apparently didn't "get it." It looked like the work of a child but it was signed, "by Jacky Mendelsohn, age 32-and-a-half." I loved reading it in the papers and I treasured the one issue of the comic book published by Dell. I later learned that this Mendelsohn guy had quite a history, writing (and even directing) theatrical animation for Paramount's cartoons studio, writing other comic strips and comic books. Jack, for example, wrote the Felix the Cat newspaper strip and most of the classic comic book, Panic, published by EC Comics in imitation of its own MAD. Jack soon became a top writer of both live-action and animated cartoon shows.

My pal Scott Shaw! has a good rundown of the man's career here so I'll just mention that Jack's credits include Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Three's Company, The Groovy Goolies, Scooby Doo, The Carol Burnett Show, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hong Kong Phooey and the movie, Yellow Submarine. That's a very partial list. Jack became a good friend of mine and I'm delighted to see the Lifetime Achievement Award go to someone with more actual Lifetime Achievements than all us past winners put together. In fact, the best thing about winning last year was that I got to be the one to call Jack and tell him that he won this year's award.

The presentation is on Thursday, November 4, 2004, at the Writer's Guild of America, West building at 7000 West 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048. The reception begins at 7 PM and the awards ceremony is at 8:00. Call the Guild at (323) 951-4000 for further info.

I've stopped looking at the various electoral projections. They're down now to moving states back and forth as one contender pulls one point ahead of the other…in a poll with a three-point margin of error that missed predicting the winner in 2000 by five points. They all have different rules of how to weigh the surveys ("We take the three most recent of likely voters and divide by the four most recent of registered voters unless conducted on a Thursday, assuming it's not raining…") and it seems to me these formulas are groping for a precision that cannot possibly be there. In any case, the fact that ten different electoral maps yield ten different scores should tip us off that at least nine are wrong.

I don't know who's going to win — or what good it does now to pretend your guy has a lock on it. I know who I want to have win…and especially who I want to have lose. In a way, I have the feeling that we're all going to lose. We're about to elect a president who about half the country will fervently believe is a very bad man who doesn't deserve the office and probably didn't win honestly. And once that guy's installed, the opposition party will be having meetings, scheming how to cripple his presidency and perhaps gin up some investigations that could lead to impeachment. Just what we need when we're at war and the economy's hanging on by its fingernails.

As happens too often, I don't have a high opinion of any of the folks whose names I'll see on my ballot on Tuesday, at least under the "President" category…and I'm suspicious of those who claim they really and truly like their choice. I think the Bush supporters are kidding themselves to claim they have a man of character, or even one that has a clue how to deal with our current problems. Hell, Bush hasn't even convinced me he knows there are problems. But John Kerry has also failed to inspire great confidence. One of the best arguments for him turns out to be that he couldn't do much worse, and that a fresh start — clearing out folks like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice — is what is needed at the minimum. I think Kerry's a smart man with better intentions than we've seen in and around the White House lately. But with the wafer-thin mandate he's likely to have if he wins — to say nothing of a probably-Republican Congress — I can't say that I'd be optimistic he could make a lot of difference.

I can't help but think that if the Democrats lose, the common wisdom will be that they didn't fight dirty enough. If Republicans were running against a President Gore with this track record, they'd be screaming that the deficit alone — never mind Iraq or National Security — proved the incumbent was close to destroying America as we know it. Kerry, because of his initial vote to authorize funds for the Iraq war, has been hampered in declaring it a disaster and the waste of human and financial resources that it's turning out to be. In hindsight, I think Howard Dean would have been a stronger candidate, if only because he could be as hard on the economic points as Kerry and harder on Iraq. This is not to say I'll be surprised if Kerry wins; just that it shouldn't be as close as it now seems to be.

The worst thing about Friday's Osama tape, apart from showing that he seems to be alive and well, may be that it muddies the post-election analysis. You can make a strong argument that the reappearance of our real enemy helps Kerry: It reminds America that Bush failed to catch the mastermind of 9/11 and that it was not Saddam Hussein, as some Bush voters seem to believe. You can also argue that it helps Bush because much of America wants a John Wayne nuke-the-enemy approach to roaches like Bin Laden, and they still think Bush is Mr. Tough Guy. No matter who wins next Tuesday (or whenever someone wins), we're going to hear that ol' Osama tipped the election in that guy's direction. But no one can ever really know. We may not even know who got the most votes.

This was taken about eight minutes ago, looking out the sliding glass door onto my back patio. We had a gap of several months there with no raccoons turning up in my yard to poach on the cat food I leave out for local strays. I thought they were gone for good…but this last week, they began showing their masked faces…and last night, I saw one that was larger than either of these. Just in time for Trick-or-Treat.

Los Angeles Times obit for Bill Liebowitz. And I should report here that I've gotten an awful lot of calls and e-mails from folks who are still in shock over this loss.

They'll probably catch it and fix the mistake before long…but currently at Slate, they have the above box up on their day-by-day poll tracking column. This may be an unintentionally true reading of how the election will go. Remember: Last time, the loser got more votes, too.