A note to our readers.

Ever since The Chicago Daily Tribune confidently proclaimed "Dewey Defeats Truman" in 1948, print journalists have been well aware of the pitfalls of publishing on the eve of an election. Our December issue, which went to press in late October, confronted us with that very problem, and we've dealt with it decisively--by having it both ways. We've created two cover packages: one that assumes a Democratic victory, the other, that the GOP holds on. To do so, we rounded up a bipartisan group of veteran Washington observers and asked them to write short pieces in response to either outcome, or both.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight can often be more revealing. Whenever you're reading this, and regardless of what happens (or happened) on November 7, we think you'll find Dick Armey's surprisingly ambivalent musings on a GOP "win" as thought-provoking as Tom Daschle's advice to "victorious" Democrats.

There's another advantage to our approach: If you don't like the actual election results, you can always flip the magazine over and pretend things turned out differently.

--The Editors