So it comes down to Ohio.
(Meanwhile, The Daily Show is cheering me up immensely as Samantha Bee conducts exit polling of people leaving a bathroom and some poor bastard leaving a peep show.)
Odd how news organizations never seem to learn much from election to election. (Except “Wait before calling Florida.” We had a bet going here. If one more talking head had intoned one more solemn pledge not to announce the outcome before the numbers were in, I was to post a video on this blog of me doing a naked handstand in the middle of Robson Square. You were one Judy Woodruff away from a money shot, people.)
You’d think they could fill all that air time with content, instead of endlessly going over the same set of oh-so-slowly-coalescing numbers. Maybe a discussion of how key issues had panned out over the campaign. Or a look ahead to what differently newly-elected or re-elected legislators might be planning for the term to come.
Instead, viewers who might have been a little jazzed about the election and politics, maybe for the first time, get fed a steady stream of inside-the-Beltway numerrhea. They learn that, no, politics isn’t about their lives and dreams and hopes; it’s about the alienating calculus of the horse race.
Someone out there in TV-land is finally going to figure out a better way to do this. But it’ll have to wait for another election. Tonight, a status quo that works far better for insiders, reporters and hacks (hello!) than for the rest of the population reigns supreme on every station on the dial.
As I type this, Wolf Blitzer has just announced that Ohio has their newly-minted “Green State” status: too close to call. In the night’s coverage, the colour green is the only innovation.
