Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, October 31st, Halloween.

I'm David Plotz. I'm here in Washington. I'm alone in Washington, sadly. But John Dickerson

is wherever Barack Obama or John McCain is. You are wherever Barack Obama is right now, right, John? Where are you?

Right. At the moment, I'm standing on the, in the outfield of the Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota, where Obama's just finished giving.

It had its first rally of the day, and I just spent the previous three days with Senator McCain in.

I can't even remember all the states we were in, but a number of different battleground states. And now I'm with Obama for the next few days. And joining us from New Haven, I think, is Emily Bazelon. Emily, how are you? I'm pretty good. Not as exciting as... It's not as warm here as in Sarasota. John was just complaining about how warm it was in Sarasota.

Well, I know, but it's cold here, although the leaves are turning in a very beautiful way.

That is just so nice.

I'm so glad to hear that.

That's so beautiful.

That's great.

Let's move on.

Today, the Gab Fest is the final pre-election Gab Fest, and that means we're going to talk about the election. We're going to talk about the election at the beginning. We're going to talk about the election in the middle, and we're going to talk about the election at the end. And then we'll never talk about the election again. I can't wait. I think like we could find some nominal way to find three topics here, and I could pretend that we have three separate topics,

but really we're going to talk about the election the whole time, and then we'll have cocktail chatter, which will probably also be about the election, but maybe one of you will

surprise us and not chatter about the election. So, John, you wrote a great piece that went up on

Slate on Thursday. That's today. We're taping Thursday, although you're listening on Friday, about how McCain thinks he can win.

Tell us a little bit about the McCain path to victory.

Well, we have basically four days until the election when people are here.

And when I was out with McCain for the last three days, his advisors were happier than they have been in a long time now uh... they're so bedraggled as everyone involved in these

campaigns is for you know after running for two straight years that um it's hard for them to

just play act so the question is whether they have reason to be elated or whether they're

just participating in self-deception which is also the kind of thing that kicks in at the end of the campaign as you're looking for any kind of possible good news.

...