The anxiety is high.

Before an election, the anxiety is really high.

People's lives are at stake, literally.

Not your life, not my life, but the Politico's life.

The people who make their living on convincing you how to vote and what to do about it.

They're in extreme anxiety.

And it reminds me of when I was a kid, before I got in the news business,

and I was on the merchant ship, HMV Poseidon, her master's vessel, Poseidon,

a 10,000-ton Liberty ship going about top speed, 11 knots,

full of grain from New Orleans.

And it rode low in the water, and we took us 40 days to get across the Atlantic to Nigeria.

40 days.

We traveled slow because we couldn't go faster, and there were storms.

And in those 40 days, the rats in the hole kept eating,

and they would drink condensation off the water pipe,

and they would eat, and they would eat, and they would eat.

And by the end of it, you stick a big vacuum tube about eight feet wide diameter.

You stick it in

the tube in the hole.

And they suck up the grain

into the grain elevator.

And a big cloud

...