Electing to Go With Starry-Eyed Predictions Over Political Pundits

Enough with the polls. Enough with the pundits. Enough with the margins of error.

I want to know what’s going to happen, and I want to know now. Before the polls close. Before they even open.

So I asked an expert -- like the one Nancy Reagan turned to when the going got tough; like the one Orange County’s treasurer-tax collector consulted in the dark days before bankruptcy.

I asked an astrologer.

Brian Evis is the man, a professional astrologer in these parts since the Nixon administration, and when I asked him to help me out here, I found he was already way ahead of me -- he’d begun scanning the election star charts some while ago.

What I wanted to know was this: What does today look like for the principals? For the voters? For the future?

I won’t tell you right now who he said will win. You’ve got to read this whole thing. I had to write it, after all. You want short, turn on the TV.

OK, OK, I’ll give you one early -- the way they hand out the best supporting actor right off the top at the Oscars, then make you sit and fidget two hours for the next big one.

Gray is a goner. He’s a Capricorn with a “lot of Leo in his chart, like Schwarzenegger,” but “Saturn is coming down to knock him out of office,” says Brian. “There’s no way he’ll get reelected. He’s just gone.”

With Saturn whupping Gray upside the head, “it’s all about finances, and when you have Venus and Pluto out of bounds, he’s a little bit beyond society’s rules when it comes to finances,” Brian says. “I just think the public subconsciously recognizes there’s something wrong here financially.” Maybe Gray’s rising sign is the dollar sign.

You don’t need polls or stars to know that this week hasn’t been stellar for the Grayster -- all those aspects of “aggression and impulsiveness,” says Brian, are “interfering with his judgment, and it suggests Gray Davis is really aggravating the people around him trying to help him out.... Someone behaving desperately, is what it comes down to.”

But there’s good news for Gray. If he’s sent packing, he should pack his good suits and head to Berlitz, because a late-bloomer aspect shows Brian that Gray has a career as a diplomat. He is “just a natural as a government official,” says Brian. “He’d be great as a foreign delegate to France or someplace like that. His ninth house is wonderful, and he’d be the best foreign diplomat. Which he would adore, by the way.”

So Gray’s packed the American Tourister and called a taxi. What about Tom McClintock, a Cancer?

“Now this is a good man. I like him and I think so does everybody else,” but “he’s really a behind-the-scenes man, to be honest with you. This is the power behind the throne. It would be nice if he became Arnold’s financial advisor, because that’s what he’s so good at.”

All last week, and even today, says Brian, McClintock’s been “trying too hard. And it’s really for his own ego purposes, because he should be dropping out.... After the election, he has a major aspect where he has to let go of some cherished ambitions, and that’ll be kind of painful for him.” [What, the car tax won’t be repealed?]

Now, Cruz Bustamante, the Central Valley Capricorn, is a guy with a “very analytical Virgo moon and the same wheel, the same outer-planet transit” as Arnold. [You’re writing all this down, aren’t you?] “This,” says Brian, “is a good person in his chart. He has a real nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic going at the moment. He thinks of himself as a symbol of success; he works terribly hard -- this is a very practical chart, he’s very practical, in fact, dare I say he’s very lucky the more practical he tries to be.”

Our Cruz is a worrywart, and sometimes insecure, “and when he feels insecure, he can come across as a know-it-all and arrogant, and he’s not like that at all. He’s really very sensitive, but people see a cold, critical facade -- he does a ... good job of hiding his feelings. If Cruz and Tom would sit around and have a couple of beers on television, everyone in California would love them.” [Cruz is a wine guy and I suspect Tom is a teetotaler, but I get Brian’s point.]

Yet election day for Cruz “has an aspect where he feels like he’s not making progress. Everything is status quo, and it’s not moving ahead.”

And now to Arnold. A Leo whose progressed sun just went into Libra, which in politics is the house of social destiny, but you knew that already.

While he might be wrong, Brian thinks -- here comes the payoff for sticking with me here -- he thinks Arnold will take it.

Here’s why. There’s the “total energy” in his chart -- he’s ambitious, and he “always believes he’s a winner, and he’s willing to work long and hard.” He may not be scholarship material on politics, but “he’s willing to listen to people who are experts in fields he’s moving into. He learned that moving into bodybuilding.”

What else has Arnold got going for him -- besides a bank balance the size of Bhutan’s budget and more free media than a J. Lo bust-up? “No fear of failure, which can be offensive to people who are a little wishy-washy, and he’s programmed himself to succeed.”

There’s a second-place trophy. Brian says that the loser, Cruz or Arnold, “is going to be very glad he loses, because he has a big career movement starting next spring in his chart. There’s something else he’s going to be doing.... He has a really good 2004.” [The White House? The Oscars?]

For the voters, today “opens fairly strongly” -- sounds like the stock market, doesn’t it? Brian says we’re feeling “independent and rebellious and original. It’s a day when only the strong shall survive and the public will know who the weak leaders are, and they will not elect anyone perceived to be weak.”

And for everyone else, in California and around the big, star-struck, dumbstruck world, the moon is in Pisces, which will help voters “to get over the shock or surprise” of it all.

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Like your average Californian, I’m interested in just one thing in this election -- me. Where does all this leave me?

If Arnold wins, it leaves me in deep, that’s where. So let me say right now: All that stuff I wrote about Arnold before? About him not being able to remember meeting with energy villain Ken Lay? About him being able to balance the budget but maybe costing the state big in sexual harassment suits? About his going AWOL from the Austrian army for a bodybuilding contest? About his not voting in six of the last eight state elections?

I was just making statements that were ludicrous and crazy and outrageous because that’s the way I always was. I knew they would get headlines. We were promoting bodybuilding -- I mean newspapers. I was always outrageous. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done the things I’ve done in my career.

Hey, if the voters can believe it from him, they can believe it from me too. But just to hedge my bets, I’ve called my mother to ask whether I could have my old room back.

She said she’d think about it.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.