It's no fun having a blog if you can't make wild, unscientific predictions. I say John Kerry will win the Presidential election on Tuesday. Things being as they are, we may not know for months (or ever) if I'm right or wrong, but there it is. Readers can check back later to see how smart or stupid I am.

I haven't based my prediction on any polling. I have ignored the polls as much as possible. It's close. That's all the polls say. No, I'm basing my election call on what I'm calling the Christoher Hitchens factor.

My reading is that Hitchens is tentatively trying to reestablish his Left-wing credentials. If you read between the lines of his articles, he is looking a bit wobbly. He's declared himself a Kerry supporter (barely) in an Oct. 26 survey of Slate contributors. He's also said some critical things about Bush in an Oct. 2 article for the Mirror. I predict that Hitchens is about to jump back across the political divide and that a lot of other "liberal hawks" are ready to do so too.

The strange political journey of Christopher Hitchens from Left to Right (and possibly back again) mirrors the confusion that has stuck the entire Left since September 11, 2001. The barbarity of that event temporarily stunned the Left into silence. I would say there was a dim understanding that abject moral relativism and a lack of confidence in liberal democracy was not going to be sufficient. The Left split into three camps. The first is what could be called the Sept. 10 camp, the flat-earthers. This group carries on as if Sept. 11 never happened. The second is the Michael Moore camp, the "peace in our time" crowd. This group was radicalized by Sept. 11, and blames American foreign policy for the attack, sometimes even to the point of wanting to appease terrorists. The last camp is the liberal hawks, of which Christopher Hitchens is the chief exponent, at least in terms of punditry.