What Happens Tuesday: As seemingly every politician spends this weekend feverishly campaigning for any other politician on the ballot from their party, it becomes impossible to predict the shape of Congress and the Governor's mansions come Wednesday. The Washington Post tries to simplify as much as possible the House and Senate pickups each party would need to maintain total Congressional control, but even this attempt seems unsatisfactory - it mentions not once the importance of voter turnout.

The ability to mobilize base voters is what will push this election one way the other. While the Democrats, with labor support, seem to have this advantage every election cycle, the GOP has spent millions on new strategies to rally their voters. Moreover, appealing to certain constituencies can indirectly facilitate a number of upsets. Case in point - Democrat Ron Kirk is expected to fall short to Republican John Cornyn in the race for Phil Gramm's Texas Senate seat. In addition, Democrat Tony Sanchez is almost certainly not going to win in the governor's race (though not by much) against Bush's successor, Rick Perry. But here's where the Democrats can benefit - Sanchez is likely to mobilize a extensive Latino turnout on election day, who in a majority of circumstances vote for the Democratic slate. It is these voters who do not show up in polls for the Senate, because they are not yet considered likely voters (indeed they're not - most will be convinced to vote this weekend, Monday and Tuesday). So, if Kirk can grab a signficant amount of the Sanchez Latino coattails, he might just have a fighting chance.

The Post article tends to lean on the position that Tuesday will bring no change at all - the Democrats will keep their minute control of the Senate, and the GOP seems poised to hang on to the House. For what it's worth, I think that seems about right. Perhaps the sweetest outcome in a contested race this year would beFlorida, where Jeb Bush is struggling to hold off Bill McBride at the last minute. Yet, with Bill Clinton, Al Gore and George W. Bush all converging there this weekend in a last chance effort to get out their party's vote, I think I can safely predict chaos there again on Tuesday, as Florida can once again prove how little it has done to fix the litany of problems that spoiled the 2000 election.

Morbid Coincidences: "...As Minnesota mourns the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, many of the state's residents have been receiving fliers bearing a picture of a tombstone. The fliers, sent out by a conservative business group, denounce the late senator's support for maintaining the estate tax. Under the tombstone, the text reads in part: 'Paul Wellstone not only wants to tax you and your business to death . . . he wants to tax you in the hereafter.' " As the column notes, the group sending it out obviously had no clue of future events. Kinda spooky though.

The Way Bush Does/Did Business: In the first few months of the Bush Administration, when that whole landmass called Eurasia didn't matter so much, the official foreign policy of George W. Bush consisted of one country - Mexico. It was a natural for Bush, a Texan and newbie to international relations, to cling to our closest neighbor not resembling the 51st state. This relationship culminated in the September 2, 2001 Official State Dinner for President Vicente Fox, which Fox called "a family affair." The dinner exemplified the course that the president had set out for his international relations - a series of personal relationships, some which prosper (Putin, Blair) and which don't (Chirac, Schroeder), but all of which play a huge stake in our nation's policies towards the rest of the world.

Low and behold, our pal Vicente won't be following us into unilateral action against Iraq. As a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Mexico has a large say in what final resolution against Iraq will be passed. Once considered an "easy vote" by administration officials, Mexico has now says it favors the competing resolution being offered by France, which gives the US less latitude to act without further defiance by Iraq. This episode should be a message to the president that his two ways of gathering international support for his actions - by developing a personal relationship with the leader or by bullying them into giving at least tacit approval - simply isn't going to work within the framework of the UN. By choosing his course to pass through the UN (an obvious one, at least to most people not named Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle or Wolfowitz) Bush has, whether he knows it or not, tied himself into following internationally accepted rules of proceeding with his case for war. Spurning the rest of the world now is a decidedly dumb idea, so unless the president can charm national leaders in Syria and China into following his lead, it looks as though the most powerful country in the world will be one-upped by France, of all places. Weird.

Back Again: Now that two months of neglected work have been successfully compacted into a two week study/read/write-athon, I'm back once more. For good this time.