THE LOW POST: The Worst Show on Television

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When I woke up in my hotel in Pittsburgh the morning after the elections there was a yellow legal pad and a Pittsburgh Pirates novelty pen ($4.95 in the Sheraton gift shop) splayed on the bedspread, the pad containing about nine pages of single-spaced notes. The night before, after coming home from Rick Santorum's concession speech downtown, I'd flopped in bed, popped a sleeping pill and started frantically taking notes from the various cable-news election spectaculars.

There is a lot of garbage and nonsense in these notes (i.e. "10:47 p.m. Chris Matthews' mouth always looks like it just had a cock in it/something about the way he moves his lips/creepy") but on the whole it is a fairly accurate representation of the long arc of depression I followed before finally falling asleep late in the morning:

10:25 p.m. CNN showing Joe Lieberman's victory speech. Lieberman bearing leprechaunish grin, thanking everyone on planet earth. "And I thank," he shouts, "the firefighters of the state of Connecticut!" Lieberman looks at firefighters in room and smiles, like he really likes firefighters. Then he looks back at the camera triumphantly with a look that says it all -- "Nice try, you fuckers! Get ready for six more years of ME!"

After that Lieberman starts blathering about his "Lieber leaders," drawing more cheers; he does the closed-fist/thumbs-up thing at the word "Lieber." Three years ago in New Hampshire, it was "Liebermaniacs." What's next? "Lieber-holes?" "Lieber peepers?" Worse? And I want to thank all the Lieberfuckers in the audience tonight, without whom this wonderful victory for all our Connecticut citizens would not have been possible...

To me, this ruins the whole evening. I can't see any way to describe any day in which Joe Lieberman wins an election as a good day, but here's the good news: Six years from now, both the Republicans and the Democrats will run serious candidates, and Joe Lieberman will be scrambling for the last eleven percent of Connecticut's half-in-the-grave vote, running on a ticket of "the terrorists support both of my opponents." It'll be worth staying in journalism just for that.

There's a strange footnote to the Lieberman coverage; on virtually all of the networks, both Lieberman and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are listed in the Democrat column in the Senate, and all discussions about the balance of power in the Senate count both men on the blue side, even though both are independents and the real count is 49-49-2. Lieberman, though he considers himself a Democrat, is ideologically distant enough to have had to run against a centrist millionaire Democrat in the general election. And Sanders, though he won the Democratic nomination, is a true independent, beholden to neither party and much closer to Ron Paul than Rahm Emmanuel. I get the sense two things are at work here: Lieberman is being rehabilitated as a Democrat in the media, and the "socialist" background of Bernie Sanders is being kept under the rug a little bit.

This is too bad because the Sanders Senate win was one of the few truly interesting and novel things that happened on this election night -- probably the farthest advance up the face of the two-party mountain we've had in the last fifty years or so. Sanders proved that it is possible to win a major office in this country without having to make a deal with the usual financial interests who control the two parties. True, he did so in a tiny state, on the strength of genuinely anomalous name-recognition numbers and something very close to a personal relationship with every voter in the state, but it was a major win all the same. But for the sake of narrative consistency both the networks and the Democrats are happy having Sanders in their column for tonight, anyway. I'll be interested to see how fast they throw him overboard once Bill O'Reilly does his first show about Vermont's Communist senator.

10:46 p.m. Barack Obama on CNN; becomes the fourth Democratic politician on air this evening to mention the "anxiously awaited" Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq. The talking points for both parties have been abundantly clear since shortly after 8 p.m., when the first whiff of a Democratic sweep filled the air. The Republican politicians (win or lose) all start off thanking the Lord in their post-race speeches, then move to thanking (in order) their wives, their kids, and then, if they are senatorial losers, the senior Republican senator from his state who provided him with "the best friend I ever had" during this difficult race.

The Democratic talking points, meanwhile, are "a new direction," "change" and the anxiously awaited Baker-Hamilton report. Obama appears to be standing on his tiptoes while he talks in an effort to look Lincolnesque, much like John McCain will seem to be doing later this evening when he appears draped in flags and practically wearing his Straight Talk '08 bumper stickers, drooling for power like a fruit bat with rabies.

11:00 p.m. CNN calls the Connecticut fifth congressional for Chris Murphy, with incumbent Republican Nancy Johnson fucking the dog. This is the Democrats' 10th pickup of the evening and Anderson Cooper mentions that the "magic number" is now five. All of the CNN panelists and over half of the MSNBC panelists will be dead from sports cliches by morning.

The worst episode would probably be a nasty interview on MSNBC the following morning with Tom DeLay, who was surprisingly ubiquitous after the election wipeout, popping up on several channels to remind America that he hadn't been convicted of anything yet, not exactly. In his post-race assessment the following morning DeLay would spit out one sports cliche after the other. "The Democrats didn't win, the Republicans lost," he began, explaining that the Republicans had faltered by being too timid. "If you play not to lose, you'll lose," he said. Asked if he still thought Karl Rove was a genius, DeLay scoffed. "Of course," he said. "Just because you lose one ballgame, doesn't mean you're not a genius anymore." A prolonged discussion of the "ballgame" ensued.

With each passing election season the format for political coverage on TV morphs even further in the direction of sportscasting. Most of the networks on this election night quite baldly copied the NFL Countdown format, with one Max-Headroom/Chris Berman celluloid host figure (Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, etc.) set off to the far left on a set with four "expert analysts." On CNN the roles of Tom Jackson, Michael Irvin, Steve Young and Ron Jaworski were filled by the likes of Candy Crowley, James Carville, Bill Bennett (a dead ringer for Peter King) and J.C. Watts, and the general topics of discussion -- who would win the big game, whose prospects for next year were better, which coaches needed to be fired, what halftime adjustments needed to be made -- were virtually indistinguishable from the real football shows. Jeff Greenfield to Wolf Blitzer, just before midnight on CNN, sounded like a man talking wild card possibilities for the Jaguars three weeks short of the playoffs: "They need three of these four states to take the Senate," he says. And choose your cliche, Wolf. Inside straight? Run the table?

Wolf: "Whatever it is, we'll be here, we'll be watching until it's clearly resolved one way or another."

Any reporter worth his AFTRA card can see that this is the same job, that there is absolutely no difference between pointing out that Indy has a soft second-half run defense and that the Knoxville and Nashville precincts, if they come in late, will come in hard for Harold Ford.

The thing that people should be concerned about isn't that the news networks are choosing to cover politics like a football game. It's the idea that both televised football games and televised politics might represent some idealized form of commercial television drama that both sports and politics evolved in the direction of organically, under the constant financial pressure brought to bear by TV advertisers. Both politics and sports turned into this shit because this format happens to sell the most Cheerios, regardless of what the content is. If you work backward from that premise, and start thinking about what the consequences of that phenomenon might actually be, your head can easily explode.