I’ve usually been a critic of Tuesdays. Classes drag on for 80 minutes at a time. By Tuesday, the excitement of the last weekend has run its course and the four days before the next drag on like a Susan Sarandon movie marathon. As I came to learn during my dining hall days, the worst meals Canyon Vista served were, like clockwork, on Tuesdays. Nobody likes Tuesdays.

Enter Oct. 7, 2003. It was roughly 10 a.m. when I awoke, and on top of it being a Tuesday, my spirits were already treading water in a Tijuana gutter. My beloved Oakland A’s had choked yet again in the Major League Baseball playoffs, and I had spent the remainder of the preceding night playing virtual manager with my fellow A’s fans while drinking more cheap red wine than the Paisanos in Steinbeck’s “”Tortilla Flat.””

Few things demoralize avid sports fans more than when their team loses in the playoffs. When “”friends”” bring up these losses, you feel like they’re really saying, “”Hey, I heard about your dream girl dumping you ‹ that’s too bad.”” Having these idiots rub it in is like having them say that they’re the one she’s bedding with now. The moral of the story: Be careful about what you say during the playoffs, because the response may be a left hook.

But I decided to worry about my next opponent that morning ‹ Total Recall. I threw on some shoes and was walking toward my local polling place when I felt “”it.”” Yes, “”it”” being the 3.6 magnitude earthquake that hit a local fault that morning. I don’t know exactly what spurned it upon us. Perhaps it was symbolic of how the people were giving Sacramento the ol’ shakedown and jostling the corruption free from the state capitol by holding this election.

Or maybe it was a warning shot from the higher-ups (you know, God and stuff), proclaiming that fire and brimstone would follow shortly thereafter if we continued to play around with our democracy by buying signatures to hold a high school popularity contest where Mr. Universe goes against a guy whose personality is the only thing less colorful than his name. Either way, the natural order had been disturbed, for better or worse. After all, how else could the Red Sox have advanced?

But for chronology’s sake, I will save the ravin’ about Total Recall for later. An equally disturbing event for this Democrat was to see my horse for the presidential nomination, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), withdraw his bid before the first primary. Yes, I realize that in the polls he was only a few pegs above Carol Mosley Braun, Rev. Al Sharpton, and everybody’s favorite oddball, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). But we’re ruling out the old Democrat way: that the nominee is always a dark horse.

Rewind history 12 years, if you will, and take a look at who stood at six percent in the Gallup polls in Oct. 1991 ‹ 13 months before he would unseat an incumbent. Bill Clinton is correct. Similar stories, for one reason or another, can be made for Democratic candidates Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, Michael Dukakis and George McGovern. Sure the latter two got their asses kicked, but they were nominated nonetheless while being smashed in the early polls, much like Graham was.

But what was so appealing about Graham anyway? Why haven’t I jumped on the Howard Dean bandwagon, a cult comprised of hipsters and NPR liberals that rivals the Jonestowns of Friendster, the Boy Scouts and every high school band combined? He is running an awesome campaign that appeals to the wannabe activists in colleges and has used the Internet better than anyone else in this race to garner cash and support.

It’s mainly because Howard Dean is from Vermont, and I haven’t come to respect that yet. He did all of these great things for Vermont ‹ balanced the budget, worked to provide 92 percent of the state’s adults with health care, improved the state’s schools. But come on, it’s Vermont, a state as white as a John Hughes movie (97 percent) and with a population half the size of San Diego.

Graham, on the other hand, balanced eight consecutive budgets as governor of Florida, a state with the complexities of a diverse population ‹ urban and rural, hayseeds and immigrants ‹ while being the very definition of a swing state, as the 2000 election can prove. Also of note is that Florida is in the South, the region that every successful Democratic candidate has hailed from since Kennedy.

But even so, Americans have to realize that this election has already been split into two issues by the media ‹ national security in the post-9/11 world and the economy ‹ and that if the Dems are going to heave a polar opposite of Bush onto its stage, he better be armed to the teeth. Graham has served as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and has been a vocal opponent of the president’s handling of Iraq from the get go. In July, Graham and other colleagues finished the report on 9/11 while he questioned why Bush should be be impeached to investigate whether or not he misled us about uranium or the reasons to go to war. Hell, we impeached Clinton for dropping his drawers. As a bumper sticker I recently saw exclaimed, “”When Clinton lied, nobody died.””

Graham wasn’t afraid to say the same and wasn’t given due credit when the logic is clear and just.

As for the economy, once again I don’t see how balancing a budget in Vermont can hold a candle to balancing it eight consecutive times in 1980s Florida. Graham opposed every step of the irresponsible Bush tax cuts and the Republicans’ attempts to destroy Medicare in the latest prescription drug bill (which Dean publicly supports) among other things. In the end, he didn’t have enough money to keep up with the big dogs. I just hope he’s around in November 2004 as a running mate because it would be a shame to see such an electable candidate go to waste for the Dems.

So yes, the milk has been spilled and I’m not quite ready to sip on the Dean Kool-aid just yet (although Karl Rove is smugly hoping that I and every other Democrat do so, as he is quoted as saying in the July 5 issue of the Washington Post). And for the record, Wesley Clark is the Arnoldesque blank sheet and electable image for the Democrats.

And that leaves me about a paragraph for Total Recall. I touched on this abomination of mankind already in my Sept. 29 column. It was overall just another downer for this Democrat. Could Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante have put together a worse campaign? He comes out days after the signatures for Total Recall are certified and starts talking about “”Tough Love”” for the citizens. Cruz immediately whipped together a plan to raise revenue through a variety of taxes. It wasn’t so much the size of the taxes (25 cents on every gallon of alcohol, for example) as it was that items were going to be taxed everywhere you look. Californians weren’t about to accept any responsibilty for the deficit.

Total Recall was about putting people over politicians. Tough Love was about as popular as the taxes levied on the colonists leading up to the American Revolution ‹ monetarily small in comparison, but nonetheless very unwelcome because of the broad range of items that were further taxed.

I can’t wait for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal. Isn’t that the type of thing we run in our April Fools’ issue? I’m going to go find John Connor for help.