Wednesday, November 3, 2004

What America Watches

If you have a TiVo, you probably take what they call Season Passes" to all your favorite shows. A Season Pass means, "Record every episode of this program." Here's a list of the 100 most frequent Season Passes among TiVo users.

• Posted at 2:52 PM · LINK

Speaking of Disappointments...

I'm just now watching — or trying to watch — the Cat in the Hat movie with Mike Myers. I like Myers and I like everything Dr. Seuss ever did. Alas, the book doesn't translate into a whole movie and the make-up they have Myers in is just too freakish to accept him as a character. Art direction's great and the screenwriters came up with some very clever gags...but it's all built on a very bad idea to begin with.

• Posted at 12:17 PM · LINK

Calling It Quits

John Kerry's concession speech sounded to me like every other concession speech given by anyone who loses an election, regardless of the situation. I don't think I want to ever see a candidate come out and yell, "The voters are idiots," but there are other things that could be said in what should be a moment of candor, not political niceties. I didn't catch the Alan Keyes concession speech — if, indeed, he's even given one — but I have a hunch he didn't talk of linking arms and working together with people he thinks are destroying America.

My friend Shelly Goldstein phoned me just before the speech and said, "No matter what he says, everyone will say it was his finest moment and "Why couldn't he have spoken like that during the campaign?" Given the few moments of post-concession analysis I caught on MSNBC, I'd say she was right. But really, it was the same Kerry and the same speech everyone else gives.

One other thought I had during Kerry's speech: I'm sick of people talking about fighting for me. No one who ever promised to "fight for me" has ever won anything for me and some have done me damage. What I want is a guy who'll promise to fight people who want to fight for me. And then I'll probably have to get someone to fight the guy who's fighting the guy who's fighting for me. And then...

• Posted at 12:02 PM · LINK

Wrong is Right

I want to quote this paragraph from the Zogby Poll website, just so I can link back to it easily in the future...

"We feel strongly that our pre-election polls were accurate on virtually every state. Our predictions on many of the key battleground states like Ohio and Florida were within the margin of error. I thought we captured a trend, but apparently that result didn't materialize. We always saw a close race, and a close race is what we've got. I've called this the Armageddon Election for some time — a closely-divided electorate with high partisan intensity on each side."

Okay, he's right about that last part. But if a pollster can say, "X will win big" and then X loses and the pollster is still to be considered accurate...well, then that poll wasn't good for much of anything, was it? A saner view would be that he called a lot of states for Kerry that were within the margin of error and so should not have been called for anyone.

• Posted at 9:34 AM · LINK

The Morning After

Couldn't sleep. Got up about an hour ago to see if somehow America had suddenly realized last night was a huge miscount. Instead, I heard someone calling on all Americans to "get behind our President."

I never know what that means. Seriously. When someone says "support the President" (whoever it is), I never know what they're expecting me to do or not do.

The only thing I can think of is that they don't want to hear negative comments or criticism. This is generally for their own benefit, not the country's. The right to say you think any elected official is a liar or a cheat or an idiot is one of our most sacred rights in America. It's much more important than any right they may have, or think they have, not to hear words that distress them or call their views into question.

Honestly, I can't think of any other thing that "support the President" means, other than to shut up about him. And let's be honest. People who didn't like Bush yesterday will, if anything, like him less today. And they won't shut up about him any more than all those people who loathe the Clintons have ever shut up about the Clintons.

A friend this morning wrote me that he thinks I understated how much Democrats are still questioning the legitimacy of the Bush election of 2000. Yeah, maybe. But it mostly came down to little snide comments about "Our Commander-in Thief." This time, I think the anger is going to be such that it will have to turn into something more palpable. This is not necessarily what I want...just what I think is going to have to happen with so many Americans out there feeling that we have a very bad man (bad in terms of values but also in terms of competence) in the White House.

As I was writing the above, someone called to say Kerry had phoned Bush to concede and will soon make a public statement. Not surprising, of course, and I'm sure he will be gracious and say things intended to bind wounds. I don't think it will help. I think there are too many people out there who were once unfairly accused of being "Bush-haters" who will now embrace that label; who will feel that the way to win elections in this country is to lie about the other side as egregiously as they think the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" lied about John Kerry; who will think not that every Bush supporter was stupid but that the Republican margin of victory consists of people who believe we found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was the mastermind of 9/11, and that there was something "French" about John Kerry.

When Bill Clinton won, there was a lot of rage at him...people who felt that even though he might have won by the rules, he had not won in a moral sense. To them, he lacked any higher entitlement to the presidency. That rage had to come out in some form, and it came out in books and talk radio hosts claiming he'd had people murdered or was running a cocaine-smuggling operation. It came out as a large chunk of America saying, "He's not my president." It came out as an impeachment that, whatever you think of its merits, sure did a lot of damage to a lot of this country. Today, you have what is probably a larger group of citizens who have a rage at George W. Bush, and also the very real fear that a guy who's driven up the deficit to record proportions, harmed the lives of folks at the bottom of society and made the whole world a more dangerous place will now feel he has a mandate to do a lot more of all these things.

I'm not saying all those fears are justified but they're there, and so is the rage. It's got to manifest itself somewhere, and it won't be pretty.

• Posted at 9:03 AM · LINK

Early A.M. Thoughts

Assuming Ohio goes the way it's likely Ohio will go, we're going to be reading articles for months on why John Kerry lost. There'll be dozens of reasons, most of them probably valid to some extent. But I suspect the conventional wisdom will boil down to two reasons, one being that Kerry was not a very appealing candidate to most people. Even supporters found him long-winded and he somehow managed to sound inconsistent even when being consistent. To a lot of voters, he was just a skinny Ted Kennedy: Massachusetts Liberal. Rich kid. Thought he was better than all of us. That he was also a war hero didn't resonate with a lot of voters who considered Bill Clinton unfit for the presidency due to supposed draft-dodging. Somehow, Bush — though born into privilege — convinced a lot of people he was a down-home Texas rancher...and one of them.

The other reason, I'm afraid, will be that the Democrats weren't mean enough. I know a lot of Republicans think the Dems were plenty rough on Bush but it was not as bad as it could have been. Next time, I'm afraid, it will be.

As I think I said here a few weeks ago, it was always destined to be a sad election, no matter who won. No matter who it was, we were going to wind up with a president detested by about half the nation. In 2000, I think Democrats were better sports than the Republicans would have been if their guy had lost with a minority of the popular vote and so many very real questions about uncounted ballots and suppressed voters. This time, Bush's win seems cleaner but I think this country will wind up more divided than ever...and to the extent that happens, we all lose.

Presidencies have a way of not going the way we expect. No one who voted for Bush four years ago thought he'd drive up the deficit and get us deep into "nation-building" in Iraq. His second term may be equally full of surprises for all. At the very least, he's the one who got us into debt and Iraq and now, he's the one who's going to have to figure out how to get us out of both. I sure hope he succeeds.

• Posted at 2:32 AM · LINK