Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
Plight of the talking heads: As the ballot counting dragged on election night, the fear of dead air weighed heavy on the TV pundits, and the tautologies began to flow.
Fox News’ unflappable Brit Hume deadpanned: “Fifty-four percent of the people in the exit polls were women, and the rest, obviously, men.”
Later, stalwart Bush supporter Rudy Giuliani, adding keen insight to the general blather about Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio, explained earnestly, “Those states are going to decide it, depending on how it goes.”
On it went, hour after hour, as the news anchors searched for illumination and generally failed to find it. And yet we watched – didn’t we? – as the poll closures moved across the nation like a digital sunset, lurching from time zone to time zone.
Did we imagine it, or was there an air of disappointment among the network newsies? As George W. Bush’s popular vote total climbed, some reporters and news readers visibly sagged. Was it a projection of our own bias that CNN’s Judy Woodruff seemed near tears as she described the Democratic Party’s reaction to the loss of Florida?
And was the reluctance to call states for Bush always a reflection of the caution stemming from the memory of 2000’s gaffes, or was it that some organizations simply couldn’t bear to add to the president’s Electoral College total?
As the night wore on and the speculation grew more speculative, reporters wondered why Massachusetts’ senior senator, Ted Kennedy, was showing up at the John Kerry residence at 2:10 a.m.
Nobody made the obvious logical connection. We don’t know about the Bay State, but in California the bars close at two.
The big losers Tuesday – apart from Sen. John Kerry and ex-Sen. John Edwards – were CBS and the New York Times, whose October Surprise about “missing” explosives in Iraq turned into another hit piece that backfired.
CBS, in a blind rage after the spectacular pratfall of its National Guard “documents,” blew what was left of its journalistic reputation into scrap by plotting to run the explosives yarn little more than a day before the election.
The Times made a pass at fairness by breaking the story early to give the administration a chance to respond, which it did with alacrity.
Neither news organization – dealing with a story about military inattention, incompetence and perhaps dereliction – seemed to think it would be a good idea to check with the military. So the Pentagon got to work and cheerfully blasted holes in the piece, which was so tattered by Sunday that “60 Minutes” treated its viewers instead to a riveting expose’ of lip-synching on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Pre-election hyperbole produced the biggest inadvertent joke of the entire process. That would be the Democrats’ assertion that GOP poll watchers would intimidate minority voters.
Can’t you see some white-bread Republican turning a black voter’s knees to jelly at a west Los Angeles ballot box? Or frightening away Hispanic citizens in a south Florida barrio?
Another unintended jest: The N.Y. Times’ post-election editorial, saying that “our greatest hope now is that Mr. Bush will set out to earn the right to be seen as leader by all the nation.”
“Earn the right”? One assumes a 3.5 million-vote popular majority is insufficient evidence of legitimacy for the faction that was so proud of Al Gore’s half-million plurality in 2000 and that found Bill Clinton’s 43 percent win in 1992 so satisfying.
In our history, we have had nearly a score of “minority” presidents who managed to govern, and the roster includes such revered leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy. So, can we dispense with the “nation divided” rhetoric?
And let us remind you of an entry in “The Blind Partisan’s Dictionary”: mandate: – n. an electoral landslide that indicates voters either have (a) confirmed the wisdom of your convictions if you have won or (b) demonstrated their abysmal ignorance and lack of discernment if you have lost.
And one of the top concerns for voters was … moral values. This provides hope that the lessons of the Clinton administration have sunk in, but the “mainstream” media are ascribing this to the ascendance of the “religious right.” Which brings us to another BPD entry: religious right-winger: any person who believes in a power greater than human intelligence.
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Jack Cashill