By JOE GAROFOLI, San Francisco Chronicle

Forget what all of those advance polls are predicting. It's going to be a long election night until the final verdict is in, and you're going to need to keep yourself occupied during the endless drone of punditry.

It is a showdown made in cable-talk heaven, and it will be a staple of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which premiered on MSNBC this week. Maddow, a 35-year-old lesbian and former San Francisco ACT-UP activist, squares off against 69-year-old Pat Buchanan, who in 1992 called for a Republican "cultural war" against gays.

Michelle Obama will co-host an episode this week of "The View," a daytime TV talk show that scores huge ratings among women.

Labor and liberal activists are starting to get the national press to do what the still-feuding Democratic candidates can't: Focus on Republican nominee John McCain.

During the rush of post-9/11 patriotism, few stories were more compelling than the life and death of Pat Tillman, the San Jose, Calif.-raised professional football player-turned-soldier. And, according to those closest to Tillman, few have been as illustrative of how the government has tried to manipulate public opinion about the war.

William DeJean thinks the media hasn't been fair to his favorite candidate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The 46-year-old Chicago dentist has maxed out the amount of cash he can legally contribute to her campaign. So, on one recent day, DeJean became a one-man political media message machine with the help of a fledgling San Francisco firm called VoterVoter.com.

Presidential candidates rarely turn down a network television interview, especially on a highly rated program. But some prominent liberals are wondering why Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama agreed this week to sit down for interviews on the Fox News Channel, for years the highest-rated cable news network and the bastion of conservative TV news analysis.

Silda Wall Spitzer is a Harvard Law School graduate and a former high-powered Wall Street attorney who earned more than her husband. On Monday, this accomplished woman silently stood next to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in an increasingly familiar American media ritual: the news conference in which a male politician explains his implication in a sex scandal -- accompanied by his wife.

SAN FRANCISCO -- To Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican race for the White House is unfolding just the way he hoped it would: It's a mess.

For more than three decades, it was the hollowest of presidential campaign promises: "And we're going to get out the youth vote!" Yeah, right.