Monday, November 1, 2004

Look Back With Vigah

In the midst of all this election talk and a killer deadline I had to meet, I somehow managed to miss noting the death of Vaughn Meader, the man who played John F. Kennedy on what was at the time, the fastest-selling record album of its time. That The First Family was a comedy album made that even more remarkable. And of course, it is remarkable how short-lived was Mr. Meader's tour of duty as a comedian. When J.F.K. died, so did the career of his impersonator. It is said that the first time Lenny Bruce took the stage following the Kennedy Assassination, his opening line was either, "Phew! Vaughn Meader!" or "Poor Vaughn Meader," depending on which version you believe. (More vulgar permutations of the line have also been quoted.)

A couple of things should be noted about The First Family. One, which obituaries like this one did not make clear, is that Meader did not write or even conceive the album. Writer-producers Earle Doud and Bob Booker did. Meader was just the actor they hired to play Kennedy. He was one of several young performers around who were then doing impersonations of the Chief Exec, and he was the one Doud and Booker selected.

Another thing that should be noted is that, for all its success, The First Family was not very good and not very memorable, nor were its sequels and many imitators, many of which were also by Doud and/or Booker. Everyone bought the album but I doubt very many listened to it a second time. It was a fad and not a very long one, at that. I suspect that even if Kennedy had not been shot, Meader's career would have taken the same trajectory, albeit slower. He tried a few non-Kennedy albums later and they're just as unlistenable as The First Family.

The most interesting thing about the whole album is that it existed...and in so doing, it knocked down a lot of taboos relating to political comedy in this country. Initially, record companies were afraid of it, especially ABC Records, which rejected it on the advice of Jim Hagerty, an executive with the firm. Hagerty had worked as Dwight Eisenhower's press secretary and he thought the whole idea of mocking the President of the United States was just this side of treason. But the small company that finally put it out had very little to lose, and when Kennedy himself gave it a boost by (reportedly) being a good sport and playing it for his friends, the thing took off. Thereafter, its sheer financial success endorsed the propriety of lampooning politicians, and established the market for it. That, I think, is the enduring legacy of Vaughn Meader. And since I believe mocking politicians is a noble pastime, I think that's a darn good legacy.

• Posted at 9:17 PM · LINK

More on the Maps

And now, less than three hours after moving Florida into Bush's column, the Slate electoral cartographers have moved it back to Kerry and also shifted Wisconsin to Bush, so they have the election tied at 269-269...possibly the most chilling outcome possible.

None of this is because potential voters are changing their minds. It's because different polls are being announced in different orders, and the prognosticators are treating teensy fluctuations like they mean something.

This is real silly. The Slate folks even say, "...if you don't like that projection, just wait an hour." Part of me would like to chug-a-lug about six bottles of Nyquil and wake up when all this is over. I'm just afraid six bottles would only get me about three days into the recounts.

• Posted at 12:47 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

The silliness of watching the electoral maps today is driven home by what William Saletan (usually, one of my favorite political commentators) is doing over on Slate. For some reason, he and his staff have taken the position that there's no such thing as a state too close to call; that every state must be awarded to Bush or Kerry, no matter how ambiguous the polls are. So last night, he had Kerry winning with 299 electoral votes. This morning, he moved Ohio and Florida from Kerry to Bush, so Bush is now winning with 286. This may be great for driving traffic to their website but a pretty good argument can be made that it's just exploiting microscopic shifts of polls — some of them, less trustworthy than others — that are all well within the margins of error. In his accompanying notes, he doesn't seem to even think the shifts represent anything significant...but he recolors the map, all the same.

Again, it helps to look back at the 2000 election. A lot of these polls missed predicting the final vote in some states by 3 or 4 points, sometimes more. And today, we're looking at electoral projection maps that award a state to a candidate if he's a tenth of a point ahead in those same polls. Why is it so tough to say that the numbers indicate that either Kerry or Bush could win Ohio or Florida or any of about a half-dozen other states?

Yeah, I know. It's something to do the day before the election. As pundit Jack Germond once said, "We aren't paid to say 'I don't know,' so we have to say something whether we know or not."

My sense is that you can look at this thing two ways. If you take polls as literally as polls ought to be taken — which is to say, as probable not definite gauges — then Bush is a slight favorite. And if you look at the emotion out there and the mobilization of ground forces tomorrow, Kerry has a slight advantage. I think folks on both sides who are fantasizing about landslides are kidding themselves.

Right now, I'm less scared over who will win than I am over how messy it will be with all the charges of vote stealing and vote suppression and machines that misrecord your selections. This past weekend, we turned back the clocks and they said it was the longest night of the year. Just wait 'til tomorrow evening if you want to see a long night.

• Posted at 11:06 AM · LINK