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Hawaii vote hints
at Bush landslide

The Honolulu Lite Division of Political Prognostication, Pugilism and Pupus proudly predicts that if George W. Bush wins Hawaii's four electoral votes, he will win the presidential election in a landslide.

In one sense, this is quite a bold prediction, seeing as how due to some confusion in our crack analysis branch we predicted Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman exactly 52 years AFTER the opposite happened. We are conducting an independent audit to determine if the paradigm used to predict past events might have a few bugs in it.

We feel more comfortable about predicting the future, since it hasn't happened yet and there's always a chance -- albeit slim -- we might get it right.

So after a long session of crunching numbers, punching each other out and noshing little teriyaki meatballs, the Department of Prognostication, Pugilism and Pupus feels relatively safe (not to mention bruised and full) in saying that how Hawaii goes, so goes the national election.

This doesn't take as many cajones or calzones as you might think. Current polls show Hawaii voters favoring Bush for president. You simply have to understand that the race for president is not a national election, but 50 state elections. Whoever wins a state wins that state's electoral votes. Hawaii has four electoral votes where states like California have 4,321 or so. Being historically a Democratic state, Hawaii's mother lode of electoral votes usually goes to the Democratic candidate. But the last time Hawaii electoral votes went Republican, those candidates (Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Richard Nixon in 1972) won by landslides. Reagan beat Walter Mondale 525 electoral votes to 13, and Nixon beat George McGovern 520 votes to 17.

The fact that Hawaii is even in play for the Republicans has Democrats shaking in their cross-trainers. Hawaii will not be the Florida of the 2004 election. If Hawaii goes Republican, by the time our polls close, the shellacking will be over.

Another indication that Bush could do better than expected is that a newspaper has called for his assassination.

A columnist for the Guardian newspaper in London asked, "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. -- where are you now that we need you?"

Of course, the paper apologized, but these things are not to be taken lightly.

In 1901, William Randolph Hearst suggested in his paper, the New York Journal, that President McKinley be assassinated. Hearst claimed the endorsement of political assassination was merely a "mental exercise," but a crazy anarchist took him up on it anyway and McKinley was dispatched.

With the Crazy Anarchist Population Index showing a 1,254 percent rise in crazy anarchists since McKinley's time, such a mental exercise by the ironically named Guardian or any newspaper is unwise to the extreme.

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