Written in blunt and alarmist language, Viguerie's direct-mail pieces tapped into conservative discontent on a range of issues, from taxes to immigration to the United Nations to abortion. His Virginia-based firm, now called American Target Advertising Inc., claims to have mailed more than a billion pieces of mail over four decades. Thousands of recipients responded with donations of $10 or $15. They helped fund a network of conservative think tanks, advocacy organizations and pressure groups that, Viguerie believes, has finally achieved its end with the reelection of President Bush.

"Now comes the revolution," Viguerie recently told conservatives, according to the New York Times.

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In the corner at the restaurant's sparsely occupied bar, two young men, dressed like congressional staffers in cheap shirts and loosened ties, slouched in their seats. They declined to talk about the campaign, keeping their eyes on their mixed drinks. They only thing they would tell me -- other than the name of the vodka-based juice drink that one was swilling -- was that, yes, they were Republicans.

Two jowly men at the bar, watching the TV and hunched over what looked like or Scotch or another whiskey, also brushed me away. Dressed like lobbyists in expensive shirts and suspenders, they shook their heads emphatically: No, they did not want to talk. No, they would not say if they were Republican. No. Go away.

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The outcome of Tuesday's voting, Petrocik told me in an election eve telephone interview, is virtually unknowable in advance. The polls are broken compasses right now, he said. He reached this conclusion only in the past few days, he said, but declined to say whether he had communicated his conclusion to the White House.

"A couple of days ago, I thought George Bush was more likely than not to be reelected, based on the public polling I had seen," said Petrocik, who was a consultant to George H.W. Bush and is the author of the award-winning 1976 book "The Changing American Voter." Now, he said, "I'm not sure any of us know."

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Alaska: Appointed two years ago by her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski, to fill his unexpired Senate term, Republican Lisa Murkowski has struggled with nepotism charges. Her Democratic challenger, former Gov. Tony Knowles, who has championed Native American fishing and hunting rights, was greeted with "loud cheers" at a Native American forum on Sunday; Murkowski received "polite applause," the Associated Press reported. Yet Murkowski's father's friends -- most prominently the state's revered Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee (the panel that funds millions in pork projects for Alaska) -- have stumped hard for her in recent days. A recent poll by GOP firm McLaughlin & Associates has her up, 48 percent to 43 percent, within the margin of error. The Anchorage Daily News and the Juneau Empire endorsed Knowles. Murkowski got the nod from the Kenai Peninsula newspaper. But the Knowles campaign says its canvassers have knocked on 100,000 doors in the past few days and stresses that turnout is crucial.

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"It won't be Tenenbaum, that's for sure," said Few, a maintenance supervisor from Greer, S.C. "She's too liberal."

This is the paradox for Tenenbaum, a soft-spoken former attorney and elementary school teacher who is about as conservative as a Democrat can be. She is for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. She supports the war in Iraq. And she is in favor of the death penalty. But the question is whether even that is enough to carry South Carolina, a veterans-heavy state in the heart of the religious conservative South that voted 57 percent for George W. Bush in 2000.

Polls indicate a slight advantage for Tenenbaum's Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint, who has squandered a once-commanding lead with blunder after blunder. After shaking up her campaign staff in August, Tenenbaum hoped to capitalize on DeMint's missteps, including his assertion that gays and unmarried single mothers should not be allowed to teach in South Carolina's public schools.

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Privately aghast at his rise, the state's GOP leaders have all but fallen in line now, afraid to cross the man who may be their next senator. In interviews with Salon over several days, many Louisiana Republicans expressed anguish that a Vitter victory next week could mark the end of the state's unique tradition of moderate, bipartisan politics. This, of course, is exactly what Vitter's breed of brash, Newt Gingrich-style Republicans believe a deeply polarized country needs -- conservatives who disdain common-sense compromise in pursuit of ideological purity. And so Louisiana Republicans are deeply unhappy that the 43-year-old lawyer, known for running slashing negative campaigns with under-the-radar help from white supremacist David Duke, is on track to become the first GOP U.S. senator from Louisiana in more than 100 years.

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Elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, the 25-year-old Bond was denied his seat by legislators angry about his opposition to the Vietnam War; he was seated after three elections and a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Chairman of the NAACP since 1998, Bond is now a distinguished professor at American University in Washington and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He narrated the prize-winning documentaries "A Time for Justice" and "Eyes on the Prize."

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After telling reporters recently that he doesn't read newspapers or follow the national news, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee taped a TV ad asking if that's why Bunning didn't know that 79,000 Kentucky children lack health insurance when he voted against a bill to expand coverage. The ad called Bunning "out of touch." The irony is that Bunning made the damaging comments in an impromptu news conference held last week to dispel questions about his mental competence. He hasn't helped himself much in recent days, though: Bunning recently decried the "November 11" terrorist attacks.

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"What a shame it would be if we traded the strong left hand of Jim Bunning -- the punch that he has -- for the limp wrist of Mongiardo," Williams said. He praised Bunning, a one-time major league baseball pitcher, as "fully capable of still throwing that hard pitch from the mound. And his opponent is a switch-hitter who doesn't know if he's on the left or the right."

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"Let me explain something," the senator continued. "I don't watch the national news, and I don't read the paper. I haven't done that for the last six weeks. I watch Fox News to get my information." Told that even the Republican cheerleaders at Fox News had covered the rebellious platoon, which included a soldier from Louisville, the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee member said: "Not the times I watched it."

On Friday, the state's largest newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, ran an above-the-fold story about the baffling exchange. Sensing an upset, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) in Washington has pumped nearly $1.3 million into Kentucky in the last 10 days to support Bunning's underfunded Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo.

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The issue of Bunnings mental health has gripped Kentucky politics since Oct. 11, when the nearly 73-year-old incumbent suddenly insisted on "debating" state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo via satellite from Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington. Bunning said he was needed in Washington for votes; but the Mongiardo campaign questioned that explanation, noting that the Senate had adjourned until after the Nov. 2 election.

Then, Bunning was caught reading his closing and opening statements at the Oct. 11 debate from a prohibited teleprompter, causing the Louisville Courier-Journal to ask in an editorial if he was in full command of his faculties.

Bunnings apparent fear of the spontaneous continued this week when he didn't show up on Monday for a debate with Mongiardo at a Kentucky television station, leaving the stage to the Democrat for 30 minutes. Then, he turned down the offer to appear on "Meet the Press" for a discussion with Mongiardo moderated by Tim Russert.

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"At that point [when her son e-mailed] they hadn't been arrested yet. He was asking my advice about what could happen if they refused an order," Harris told me on Friday by telephone from Mississippi. "He said they had been ordered to take a contaminated load of fuel into a high-danger area. He said that they had already taken this load to one location, and it had been refused, and that they had, in his exact words, a '75 percent chance of being hit' on this new mission. He asked what the potential reprimands were if he disobeyed his commanding officer and, if it came to that point, what would happen to him if he had to get physical."

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The Senate assistant minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and the co-chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, held a conference call for major Democratic Party donors to urge them to take a second look at this political Kentucky Derby, where Mongiardo was previously written off as having little chance in the staunchly conservative state.

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"I was called to serve in Iraq because the government said there were weapons of mass destruction -- but they weren't there," Spc. Robert Acosta, 21, who was an ammunitions specialist with the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, says in the thought-provoking ad. "They said Iraq had something to do with 9/11 -- but the connection wasn't there ... So when people ask me where my arm went, I try to find the words, but they're not there." The ad ends with a shot of Acosta removing his prosthesis, revealing a stub where his right hand should be.

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More substantively, the incumbent would agree to only one debate with his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo. And the rules Bunning negotiated were bizarrely rigid: The encounter could not be live; the taping has to occur in the afternoon, not the evening; no audience could be present in the studio; and, under threat of legal action, Mongiardo could not use any sound clips or video of Bunning's debate performance in campaign advertisements.

This apparent fear of the spontaneous has spurred rumors in Kentucky that Bunning, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, is suffering from some sort of dementia, perhaps Alzheimer's. Bunning has declined to release his medical records. But until now, there was nothing hard to suggest that the one-term Republican senator was anything but a crotchety, occasionally confused, or arrogant old man.

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Now here is the narrative that White House political chief Karl Rove, in pursuit of every possible advantage for President Bush in the crucial swing state of Florida, has foisted on Martinez: Cuban immigrant becomes mayor of Orlando (note to Mel: Drop the "trial lawyer" part) and a member of the president's Cabinet. Known for appealing "to the worst in people" with a vicious anti-gay campaign, he caps his American dream with a run -- for U.S. senator.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Melquiades Martinez's surprising political transformation from sunny moderate to snarling right-winger is testament to the self-effacing loyalty expected of presidential teammates in pursuit of the ultimate goal: ensuring that George W. Bush prevails on Nov. 2.

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But Novak's son's employment at Regnery, revealed by the New York Times on Aug. 30, isn't Novak's only tie to the Washington publisher of conservative polemics. Novak also has a long-standing professional and personal relationship that he did not reveal -- with Regnery's owner, newsletter magnate Tom Phillips. Phillips owns Eagle Publishing, whose subsidiaries include Regnery; Human Events, a 60-year-old conservative newsweekly; and the Evans-Novak Political Report, Novak's subscription-based newsletter ($297 a year). In addition, Novak is an unpaid member of the board of Phillips' private foundation, the Phillips Foundation, which awards journalism fellowships to young conservatives.

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It turned out, of course, that Saddam didnt even have a nuclear program, much less a weapon. And Bushs frightening talk of an Iraqi "mushroom cloud" about to explode over America, the now-shelved Bradley piece would have made clear, was just another means of terrifying the public into supporting an invasion. But the heart of the report was a critical examination of how forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger had been used by the administration -- despite doubts about their authenticity -- to help justify an invasion. With anchor Dan Rather having admitted hed likewise relied on unauthenticated documents about Bushs Guard duty, Bradleys solid report was a casualty of the furor around the Rather story, which conservatives blamed on anti-Bush bias at CBS.

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One measure of the debacle is a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment that millions of viewers now will not see: a hard-hitting report making a powerful case that in trying to build support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration either knowingly deceived the American people about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities or was grossly credulous. CBS News president Andrew Heyward spiked the story this week, saying it would be "inappropriate" during the election campaign.

The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times.

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For Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., these scenes were surreal. The House Armed Services Committee member returned on Monday from Iraq, where American civilians are being kidnapped and beheaded, Iraqis are dying in suicide bombings and U.S. forces are being driven from much of the Sunni triangle. In Baghdad, the first thing she noticed was the raw sewage flowing through the streets. "Children were playing in puddles that you know are basically human excrement," she told Salon in a telephone interview Friday. "Clearly, we had a fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis."

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