Race has championship appeal
Greatest political election in history becomes battle of titans

As I turned on the TV Tuesday, I immediately became entranced by the presidential race that I had become so disenchanted with in recent weeks.

Returning from a night class, I was quickly shocked by the first dramatic turn of events that occurred when it was announced that Vice President Al Gore had won Florida. From this point on, the seesawing drama climactically unfolded throughout the course of the night.

As Dan Rather, CBS anchor, so eloquently put it, “It’s tighter than lug nuts on a ‘55 Ford.”

After a while, I almost didn’t even care who actually won, I was just hoping for a drawn out triple-overtime thriller that would preserve its place in political history.

It was like a great college football national championship that just kept going into overtime after overtime, with no one being able to pull ahead for good.

Gov. George W. Bush would bust a 20 yard run with Louisiana, and then Gore would recover a fumble with Pennsylvania. Gore preferred to score on quick strikes with long bombs to New York and California.

eanwhile, Bush chose to methodically drive the ball with a strong ground game and a huge offensive line of big businesses. He would go first down by first down as he dominated Kansas, Kentucky and many others, until he reached the end zone before you even realized it.

Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, served as the referee, who consistently fudged the marking of the ball after every play a foot or two in favor of Bush, making it that much harder for Gore to get first downs.

The announcers made a few erroneous reports and the officials had to illegally adopt the instant replay a couple of times in order the reverse the calls made on Florida.

Although I consider myself to be politically informed, I have never felt myself get nearly as emotionally involved as I did on election night. I refused to turn the channel or even blink my eyes until the victor had been announced.

Finally, at 1:20 a.m., the announcement was made that Bush had secured Florida and, thus, had won the election. After nearly six consecutive hours of viewing, I could finally rest easy at night, even though my team was unable to come out on top at the end.

However, Wednesday morning, I discovered the titanic battle was still raging on as Gore was furiously battling to make, what Rather called, “One of the greatest comebacks since Lazarus.” It also appears that the candidate with the most total yards may not even be the winner.

I didn’t even care any more. I was just excited that the game was still going on, not to be completely decided until Thursday. I was just proud of the way most of the TCU campus seemed to come together to actually care about politics for the first time since I’ve been here. Almost everyone I knew had stayed up late and ignored homework, which they usually do anyway, to see the final tallies.

However, much of my optimistic outlook was crushed when I overheard a male student jokingly tell two curious female students that Nader had won.

One responded that she hadn’t heard of him and the other said, “Really? I didn’t think he had a chance.”
Oh well, you can’t win them all.

Jordan Blum is a sophomore broadcast journalism major from New Orleans, La.
He can be reached at (j.d.blum@student.tcu.edu).

And the Winner is ... nobody. I can hardly stop laughing enough to sit down and write this column.

At the time of this writing, the presidency of the United States is still up for grabs, resting on the outcome of the recounts going on in Florida. You’d think that if all those senior citizens could understand the rules of Pinochle they would be able to count a few million ballots right the first time, but oh well.

It’s possible that Dewey may have defeated Truman this time, but in any case, even if the race is decided by the time you read this, nobody can rightfully be called the winner, and in fact we’ve all lost.

The two major party candidates have lost any sense of a mandate for their proposals. George W. Bush campaigned on a platform of huge tax cuts and “small government.” Well, George, it looks like some people want those things ... about half of us, in fact. Al Gore asked people if they were better off now than they were four years ago and tried to convince people that, à la “Wag the Dog,” “You don’t change horses in midstream.” Once again, about half of the people agreed.

My prediction, which I, like CNN, reserve the right to retract when it looks like I might be wrong, is that the eventual president will use the muddled situation to do absolutely nothing except insure that he and his rich buddies stay that way. Since I didn’t really expect anything more from either of them, I won’t be too disappointed, I suppose.

Ralph Nader lost the chance at federal funds for the Green Party in the next election, and Pat Buchanan lost the chance that he might actually be mentioned in the news ever again. I really thought we’d see a groundswell and Ralph would get between 6 and 8 percent, but then again I’m a hopeless optimist.

With or without federal funds, it’s no small feat that Nader had more than triple the vote that he got in 1996, especially considering the high voter turnout of this most current election. If Gore does eventually lose by a margin smaller than those who voted for Ralph, the Democratic Party is going to have to seriously re-evaluate its recent centrist trends.

Some dude in Missouri (Republican Sen. John Ashcroft) lost to a dead guy (the late Gov. Mel Carnahan), making me wonder if Caitlin Bree got to cast the deciding vote.

Regardless, it wasn’t enough for the Democrats to win control in the Senate, and so the American people lost the chance to end the gridlock that dominates Washington, D.C. Of course, it’s doubtful that we really wanted the gridlock to end ... governmental action tends to scare people, after all. I suppose it’s better that they go on trading tax cuts and subsidies for campaign contributions behind our backs, just so long as we don’t have to hear about it.

Hillary Clinton lost her soul, if she hadn’t lost it already. Despite my extreme distaste for the commentary of the biased, unapologetic Mary Matalin, I’m forced to agree with her charge that the first lady went “state-shopping” for a state with a huge majority of registered Democrats in her quest for the Senate. Don’t be surprised if Hillary tries to sneak her way into the presidential race four years from now ... she’s a feminist hero, after all.

I think the American people will lose their faith. The extremely small margin of victory, whatever it turns out to be, is not representative of extreme differences between the candidates, but rather an indication of how fundamentally alike they really are. Sure Al is an abortion rights advocate and George is an abortion rights opponent. Sure George wants tax cuts and Al wants federal programs. The fact of the matter is that neither of them gets to make those decisions.

Both men owe huge debts of gratitude to, as Bush likes to say, “the people who pay the bills,” and the people who pay the bills aren’t people at all, but rather huge corporations who’ve got the cash to deal out to assure that their agendas are the ones that matter on Capitol Hill. After the “get out the vote” efforts were met with such surprising success, it will be that much more disappointing when “the people” realize that they only get asked to the dance on election day, and by the time the prom rolls around they’re long forgotten.

Most importantly, my friends and I lost a Tuesday evening’s worth of partying and a lot of sleep. Imagine eight college guys hovering around a television set conversing jocularly and trading barbs back and forth. We weren’t watching a football game, or a porno, or even an episode of “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” we were watching the election coverage. It was a bit surreal, and I’m sure the Bud Light and Benadryl (hey, it’s flu season) only contributed to that feeling. But I couldn’t help but wonder if we were the exception or the rule.

I generally hang with a pretty educated bunch, so it would figure that we’d all be interested in the fate of the presidency, but then again, only half of us actually voted. After Florida was put back in play the first time, one of my buddies commented, “This is better than any football game I’ve seen this season.”

Well, we all know that the election didn’t hold a candle to the Dolphins vs. Jets game a few weeks back on “Monday Night Football,” but the point is that it wasn’t policy or proposals that attracted the attention of the college male, but rather the sense of competition. When I asked one guy why he wanted Bush to win, he responded, “Because he’s from Texas,” and looked at me like I was the one who was stupid.

In that moment, kids, we may have lost our future.

Daniel Bramlette is a senior radio-TV-film major from Ogden, Utah.
He is still demanding a recount at (dcbramlette@yahoo.com).

Should our tax dollars fund death?

  A bizarre query on the surface, perhaps, but that makes it all the more important. I only began thinking about it seriously during this year’s presidential race as the candidates discussed their political platforms.

nderstandably, abortion is an inflammatory issue for anyone who takes the topic up for consideration; proposing public funding for abortion is almost as bad.

Vice President Al Gore’s modest proposal has been a stance that turned me off to him from the very beginning; that fact has nothing to do with the fact I am Republican, and has everything to do with the fact that I am an abortion rights opponent.

I believe that taking an innocent human life in order to promote mere convenience is as bad as murder. This isn’t to say I believe that those who make the choice do so on a whim, just that I believe they commit a grievous wrong.

If I can’t stomach the idea of abortion for any other reason than to save the mother’s own life in a medical emergency, I certainly won’t tolerate the idea that my own money will go to funding activities that I find grossly immoral. I understand that we can’t legislate morality, but people shouldn’t be forced to fund clinical killing.

Abortion rights advocates might argue that denying public funding for abortion discriminates against those women who can’t afford the procedure; to this I say that it isn’t my place to provide access to that service for such women, and that it most certainly isn’t the place the federal government to demand that I do so.

Our government should never use our money to provide services that deprive innocent lives from having a chance in this world.

Other abortion rights advocates might ask how I can hold this position when our federal and state governments use tax dollars to fund killing in the form of capital punishment. In response to this matter I declare that capital punishment is wrong as well.

A time existed when the concept of capital punishment made sense, but that was long ago when there was no efficient or safe method for jailing criminals. At this point in time, however, when our culture is so very “civilized” and we are no longer nomadic but have the ability to effectively incarcerate, capital punishment should be obsolete.

Our money shouldn’t be used to fund it, and it should be reconsidered as punishment in the greater scheme of things, especially when one considers that capital punishment isn’t even an effective deterrent.

Issues such as these should get us involved in politics and voting. Our hard-earned money shouldn’t be used to cause calculated deaths.

I know that I won’t stand for my own money being used in that manner. All I can do is hope that such legislation would never pass in this country.

Miranda Nesler is a freshman English major from Houston.
She can be reached at (m.g.nesler@student.tcu.edu).

“Bush secures last-minute victory.”

So reads the dominant front page headline of Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Skiff.

But the Skiff wasn’t alone in its rush to declare Texas Gov. George W. Bush the winner of the presidential election.

After most major television networks said Bush went over the top at 2:18 a.m. EST by clinching Florida’s 25 electoral votes, many newspapers — including the New York Post, the Austin American-Statesman and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to name a few — mistakenly reported Bush as the president-elect.

Confusion reigned throughout the night as Bush saw his apparent victory snatched away after a recount was called in Florida. Vice President Al Gore, who called Bush to congratulate him after television networks declared Bush the winner, called him back an hour later to retract the concession.

The premature declaration and the backpedaling of most major media outlets recalled the Chicago Daily Tribune’s erroneous decision to announce Thomas Dewey’s victory over Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election.

Common sense should have told the media that if the candidates are separated by less than 1 percent, you don’t declare a winner in the race.

In fact, on this night of drama and confusion, the media messed up in a big way by relying too heavily on exit polls and projections.

After the networks had to retract their declaration that Gore had won Florida earlier that evening, caution should have been the order for the remainder of the election.

“That would be something if the networks managed to blow it twice in one night,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw said on-air early Wednesday morning.

Yes, it really was something. Something that shouldn’t have happened.