Most presidential elections were not like they way they are now. They’d count the votes and announce them over the radio, or print them in the newspaper, or scrawl the winner’s name in a public square.
They didn’t have a Magic Wall and if they did they would have dunked it until it drown.
The results to the 2012 Presidential Election, a campaign that seemed to be running for about three of the four years the term takes, cannot possibly live up to its billing.
It’s still largely a television event, though Twitter moved the action along more than ever.
I watched mostly on CNN because I was at a party and couldn’t keep switching back and forth to any one of six different networks. But watching just one clued me in on its lapses – all about countdown clocks to the next inconsequential state result, going to reporters at empty party events, who had nothing to say, the general lack of interviews.
They’d go to commercials but pretend they weren’t by keeping the scoreboard on the bottom part of the screen and some sort of security cam on some returns party.
There were more of those things where they post vote totals while in fine print we see it’s only percent of the vote. Whenever it seemed even, Wolf Blitzer would bellow “You can’t get any closer than that!”
Even when they called a state for one candidate or the other, Blitzer would say something about waiting until the real votes coming in. I was waiting for the real reporting to come in.
When the moment came that Obama won Ohio, and thus the whole ball of wax, CNN wasn’t really picking it up. They had been slow to announce states for candidates all night, and this time the reporter at Obama’s big rally tried to explain why her crowd was cheering. “They get excited when they see themselves on TV,” she said.
Actually, MSNBC had called Ohio for Obama and thus called the race. CNN picked up on that a couple of minutes later.
The mood at Fox News was on a downward spiral toward inevitable loss all night, their hatred for Romney was starting to reach the levels it had during the primaries. But Karl Rove, the political dirty tricks man, who is some sort of analyst without portfolio, was having none of it. Ohio wasn’t settled, he alone was saying.
How much power does Rove have at Fox News? He made Megyn Kelly go to the Decision desk to demand an explanation. He wouldn’t allow Ohio to fall.
On Twitter, a forum seemingly named for such a twit, Donald Trump was just about calling for armed revolution. The short-fingered vulgarian who failed to have any influence in the election was now being criminally bad sport.
This bad reporting seemed to have the effect of keeping Romney from conceding until about an hour later, but he did.
That pushed the Obama victory speech until 1:40 a.m. and he spoke til 2, full of those kinds of big dreams and ideas that first made him a national figure.