TV is the New Reading

Elections made for

some great television

Regardless of your personal reaction to the outcome – and honestly, there are a few results I wish had gone the other way myself – for political junkies such as myself, Tuesday night was magnificent.

I think the first election I watched all the way through was in 1992, the Bush-Clinton-Perot showdown. Before then, I can’t really remember the television being on in my house as the returns came in. Maybe we watched to see results from our state and then went to bed and read about the other returns in the next day’s paper.

I remember watching the Clinton-Dole results in 1996 with an equally politically ravenous friend from college, Nathan, out in New England. I remember following the Bush-Gore contest into the wee hours from my apartment in 2000, filling a notebook with state after state as they were called until about 3 a.m., and I remember being grumpy about it the next morning (possibly just as much from lack of sleep as partisan lean). And if I recall correctly, I took in the Bush-Kerry results with Nathan again in 2004, this time at his station WCBU in Peoria, Ill.

What I remember about both cross-country trips is that because Nathan worked in public radio, he had endlessly long nights and lots of stuff to do and updates to make while the results were coming in, so I mostly kept an eye on computer screens and hung around in the office while he went about doing work-related things.

And this year, his energies were no doubt all the more focused given President-Elect Barack Obama’s home base in Chicago is just up the road from him.

As of this printing, I had not been able to confirm or rule out the presence of champagne in the offices of WCBU Tuesday night.

Taking in a show

I chose to watch from home this year. I had an idea of renting three or four televisions and watching all of the networks at once as the results rolled in, but really, that’s why God invented the remote control. I kept up just fine with what everyone had to say by clicking around, and between the television and a couple of reasonably reliable Web sites, I feel like I was well served.

The networks weren’t as overboard as CNN and CNN’s "magic wall," where results were projected that commentator Wolf Blitzer couldn’t read, since they weren’t actually on a wall in front of him, but merely projected by a computer. This made for some jarring disconnects here and there.

Moving from high-tech to hands on, one thing I did enjoy was how NBC had positioned red and blue window-washing stations outside its building that got higher as voting progressed for each candidate. Also, they had that giant U.S. map people could walk about on, which stagehands painted in as states went red or blue like a large paint-by-numbers art project. It was very impressive, but someone should really tell them about the advances people have made in computer graphics.

The standout moments for me were in the suspense. As results continued to come in and the safer projections were made, watching battlegrounds like Virginia, Florida and Ohio remain yellow made for some nail-biting moments.

The tipping point when Obama had a clear majority of electoral votes was of course an historic moment, made all the more gratifying by:

· the sheer number of eligible voters engaged by this process – estimated near the highest percentage in a century,

· a high-water mark in the experience of minorities in America – and African-Americans particularly – in a history marked by oppression and ill-will, gaining not only the nomination of a major party but the presidency, and

· the fact that a president won not merely a plurality of the popular vote, or eked out the barest majority in the Electoral College, but rather received decisive and amplified majorities in each. Outstanding.

Speeches

Other standout moments included the concession speech by Sen. John McCain, honorable and gracious in his defeat, and the clear-eyed humility evident in Obama’s low-key victory speech. The history he shared through the eyes of one of his supporters, 106-year-old Atlanta voter Ann Nixon Cooper, painted a picture of how America has changed for African Americans and for women in the past century, and his speech made her experience a touchstone for his own daughters, envisioning what changes they might see in their lifetimes. Whatever your political inclinations, that is a truly inspiring and historic vision.

Naturally I enjoyed watching the coverage and commentary by the joint “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” “Indecision 2008: America’s Choice” presentation. Indeed, I’ve enjoyed their brand of political satire throughout this election cycle. This campaign got dark and negative enough on both sides through the primaries and the conventions and the debates that humor was, occasionally, exactly the right filter. Also, this election was fodder for some of the best one-liners, impersonations and spoofs in recent memory.

Finally, while clicking around the grid, I was aware of other channels not covering the returns at all, and I tuned in to watch them occasionally as well, just to remind myself that whatever the outcome, life would go on.

And indeed – comfort that one may take – exciting and historic and exhausting as the 2008 election has been, life has, indeed, gone on.

Back Back to Shows Back to Main Page Next