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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome back to this program "Newsweek's" senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter. In this week's edition, Jonathan has a unique take as he always does, I guess, on the Bush Presidency, calling George W. Bush America's first C.E.O. president. He joins us tonight from New York. Jonathan, nice to have you back on, my friend.

Jonathan Alter: Nice to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: Let me start, before I get--I want to walk through some of the tenants that you lay out in this article about how we should rate Mr. Bush or judge Mr. Bush as a C.E.O. president. Before I get to that, let me start with your take on what it means that in nearly every battleground state, lawyers are lined up on both sides ready to pounce. I've never seen anything like this before an election.

Alter: Well, you know how if you break a piece of pottery or something and you can see the cracks after it's glued back together?

Tavis: Right.

Alter: That's what it's like now after the 2000 elections. We're all seeing all the cracks in the pottery. And also people like sequels, so everybody is primed and it very possibly could happen. I'd put the odds at 50/50 that we're going to have another long count, and it'll be a day or so before we know, maybe even longer, who the next president is.

Tavis: Is that your way of telling me that it ain't even over until after the fat lady sings?

Alter: That's right. That's right. You could easily have a situation where one side is declaring victory and the other side not wanting to make Al Gore's mistake, will not concede defeat until their lawyers tell them that in Ohio or Florida or Wisconsin or wherever the key states are that they're willing to throw in the towel. So I really think there's quite a strong chance that you're going to see another disputed election.

Tavis: I think polarization is the short answer, political polarization is probably the short answer to the question I want to pose now. But I want to pose it to you because you're brighter than I am and you always go deeper, so maybe you'll have something here for me that I can learn from. Why are we so polarized? Why are these elections in 2000 and 2004 so close? What am I missing here?

Alter: Well, I don't have a pat explanation for you, but I think what happened was that, you know how in primaries, the candidates tend to appeal to their bases? And then that gets their base all revved up.

Tavis: Right.

Alter: But you end up having to move to the extremes in order to win primaries. Well, you start out with George W. Bush with Karl Rove's help running essentially a base strategy, saying we're not going to move to the center. We're going to try to get our base, our very conservative base to turn out in greater numbers. So instead of after the last close election, which I think was mostly just a fluke.

Tavis: Right.

Alter: Why did it stay that way? Because each side dug into their positions. If Bush had moved to the center after he became president and said, 'You know, I want to work with you, not just on education or one or two other things, but on a lot of things,' then you would have seen, I think, a different kind of presidency and a different kind of political environment.

But instead, what he did was, after September 11--and there was a period of great unity--instead of trying to preserve that, he went into the 2002 elections, and he tried to kind of cram it down the Democrats' throats. He scheduled that vote on Iraq right before the election. They tried to use the Department of Homeland Security as a political issue, even though they were actually behind the Democrats in calling for the creation of it.

A number of other partisan things that we can discuss that were part of their strategy. So once the Republicans did that, the Democrats said, all right, we got to catch up. Enough playing Mr. Nice Guy here. And they started egging each other on. You got this kind of Michael Moore type talk, which I don't think is particularly helpful, but it became a feature of making everything a lot more partisan. Both sides dug into their positions.

Tavis: That said, you called President Bush our first C.E.O. president. I want to walk through the six reasons you feel that way. I should say reasons--issues, rather, on which we should assess his performance. But why do you call him the first C.E.O. president, first of all?

Alter: Well, actually, he literally is. You know, his father was kind of in the pre-C.E.O. era, but Bush was the first president to go to business school, the first president to be involved in the corporate world, instead of coming up in politics. And the reason that I'm focused on that is that--what I tried to do just to make kind of a rundown of his record a little more interesting was to say let's judge him the way he would be judged if he were in a proxy fight and he was a C.E.O., should he be rehired or should he be fired, instead of all these emotional appeals of what kind of a guy he is, who said what about whose daughter, and whose wife people like better, let's judge him on performance.

Tavis: Right.

Alter: In the corporate world, that's the way he'd be judged. So I tried to go down a list of criteria that would be used in a corporate world to see whether he stacks up and deserves to get rehired or fired.

Tavis: Sometimes you have a brain freeze. I've been trying to find for the last five minutes that word "criteria.' Thank you for bringing it to me. I kept saying "assess." I couldn't find that one word but you brought it up. That's the simple word I was looking for. So let's run through these criteria. First, if we're going to judge him at a C.E.O., risk management. How's he doing?

Alter: Well, I would say not well so far. He's made a couple of big bets and they haven't come through. The most obvious one is he's betting that this international venture, this hostile takeover of Iraq was going to pay off and be a beachhead for democracy in the Middle East. So far, it's a big quagmire. So if he were C.E.O., the board of directors or the shareholders would say, hey, that hostile takeover didn't work out very well. So that would be one big bet that he made.

I think he also is making a bet, the results of which we don't know yet, that he could overlook certain kinds of homeland security measures, for instance, protecting ports and protecting chemical facilities, which I--for a lot of different reasons he's not protecting, and, you know, betting that we don't get attacked in one of those areas. So far, that bet is going OK. We haven't been attacked in one of those areas. That's one of his strong suits going into the election is that we haven't been attacked.

Tavis: How about the area of finance?

Alter: I think on finance, if this was again a board of directors or shareholders, he would not be looking good here. He came in with a $400 billion surplus and now four years later, less than four years later, $400 billion deficit with a lot more coming up the years ahead. That's an $800 billion turnaround on the bottom line in just a few years. And whether you're talking about a corporation or government, that's real money.

Tavis: H.R., human resources?

Alter: There the record is mixed. He got through a very important education bill, the Leave No Child Behind Act, which was the biggest educational reform in a generation, and he deserves credit for that. And he is actually--he's not funding it as much as he promised and as much as a lot of Democrats would like, but you have about a 60% increase in Federal aid to education, which is substantial, and you have to mark that down as an achievement.

But on another human resources issue, which is health care...you know, H.R. handles that in a company--there he's introduced no sweeping health care reform to insure any of the 45 million who were uninsured, to do anything about the 36% increase in health care costs on his watch, which is a terrible burden on business, in particular. Just very modest reform proposals, none of which have gone through. The one that has gone through, the prescription drug benefit is, of course, just spending more money, so that doesn't do anything to control the costs or to insure more people. And in that case, he did sell out to the pharmaceutical industry by saying that you couldn't negotiate for bulk purchase lower prices or get drugs from Canada. Now, again, if he was in business, that's like a businessman saying that he wants his supplier to charge him higher prices.

Tavis: Yeah.

Alter: Basically, that's what the government was saying when they said that Medicare couldn't negotiate for lower drug prices to hold down those health care costs. So that was something--that's an example of how if he has a choice, this president will always side with business over the consumer. You can't find any issue, if you go across the whole spectrum of issues, if you've got the consumer versus the big lobbyists for their interests, Bush is always going to go with the big lobbyists and their corporate interests. And that's not my opinion. I defy anybody to give me a case where that wasn't true.

Tavis: Well, I wouldn't try. You have defied me successfully.

Alter: Sorry, I didn't mean to be--

Tavis: That's quite all right. We got through three of the six that you cover in the article. For those who want to read the rest of it, go pick up a copy of "Newsweek" and check out Jonathan's article this week. In 30 seconds, Jonathan, tell me, as we are less than two weeks away now, who has the advantage? How are you reading this thing? I know it's a tossup, but how are you reading it with days to go?

Alter: Well, I think there's some key groups. If the evangelicals vote in greater numbers than they did the last time--Karl Rove says there's about 3 million evangelical Christians who didn't vote...if they come out, that gives Bush the edge. Younger voters, who are registering in record numbers and have been more for Kerry, that would give Kerry the edge. Then there are some new unclear things. African-American voters, for instance, there's a study that showed that Bush might get twice as many African-American votes as he got the last time. It's a small number relative to those who vote for the Democrats, but if he can get an increase there, that could be very, very costly for John Kerry and the Democrats. So each of these various constituency groups could play a big role.

Tavis: And I'm sure they will. Jonathan Alter, as always, a pleasure to talk to you. Take care of yourself.

Alter: Thanks a lot, Tavis.

Tavis: Good to see you.