NBC and Fox called Ohio for Bush around a half hour ago. CNN eventually followed. I haven't checked CBS or ABC. That gives him 269 votes. He only needs one more state to win.

As promised, Kerry is declaring victory. Mary Beth Cahill says that they are confident that Kerry will win when all votes are counted. With 91% counted, Bush is ahead by 2%.

With 80% of the national vote counted, Bush has 51% of the popular vote. There is a cruel irony here. Even if Kerry takes Ohio and wins the electoral college he will lose the popular vote and be a "pretender in chief" who will be "re-defeated" in 2008.

I don't expect this to happen. After the 2000 bad calls, the networks are not going to make a mistake like this.

Assuming that Bush does keep Ohio, let's look back four years. After the contested 2000 election the Democrats insisted that Bush would lose in 2004. Being a single-term president was in his genes, they said.

One reason Bush irritated them so much is that they wanted him to run a caretaker government until the 2004 election could put a legitimate (Democrat) candidate in the White House.