Politics: the great American game

Dan Rather looks down at his teleprompter, not to check his script—he's ad-libbing and beyond at this point—but to gather some semblance of solemnity. "Turn down the lights," he says, his voice full of grim hype. "The party just got a little wilder."

It's about 10:30 p.m., and Florida has just dropped back into the undecided category after reporting incorrect numbers in favor of Gore. The announcement sparks consternation from my roommate and I and inspires chaos across the networks. The man with the dry-erase board is rubbing ink away with his thumbs, and Tom Brokaw's well-honed baritone is squeaking slightly.

As the night goes on and more states turn red, we get grimmer and grimmer. It's not fear for the future of ourselves and the country—it's the same grimness that settled over the room when my roommate was watching the Mets lose their grip to the Yankees. We alternate sips from a bottle of whiskey, more for ceremony than anything else.

After an hour we head back across the hall to do some reading. With the night wearing on, my roommate checks CNN.com for breaking news more and more frequently, and I eventually join him. At about 2:10 a.m. we're staring at a screen full of ominous numbers when a cry of "Buuush!" more crazed than any diehard, drunken football fan could muster echoes across the Silliman quad. My roommate clicks on the refresh button and there are the numbers again, not much different except for the red icon that's now sitting beside the data. It's disappointing, though at the heart of it I'm not sure why. My roommate sums it up well: "It's not that I really think this will have any impact on the way that I live my life...It's just disappointing that there are so many people in this country who voted for what Bush stands for." I'll bet he feels the same about all the Yankee fans out there.

With the ceremony over, we retire to a game of Baseball Simulator 1000. CNN.com's victory picture of Bush looms on the adjacent computer screen as we play, and it's almost as if we can turn the election around if only we put in a really good Nintendo performance.

At 3:30 a.m., we pull up CNN.com, just to see what the official line will be in tomorrow's headlines and read that Gore has retracted his concession message to Bush. Back on CBS, Rather's eyes are no longer focusing in the same direction, and he's covering his bases like a bookie who's made some bad odds. "We've lived by the crystal ball," he says, "and eaten so much glass tonight we're in critical condition." Leslie Stahl makes a few impassioned remarks about the sympathy we should have for the candidates after they've been through so many emotional ups and downs this evening, and Rather tears her apart for it. He talks about the white-collar workers who have to face middle-management scrambling; he talks about blue-collar workers who have to put in demanding physical labor; he talks until he's covered the trials and tribulations of everybody in the workforce. "No, Leslie," Rather concludes, "I don't feel too much sympathy for the candidates."

My roommate and I grin at this. The presidential elections are the last great sporting event we have left in this country, and everybody is a participant—from Pat Buchanan to the Yale College Democrats hurling epithets at Nader's dogged face through impenetrable TV screens, to aloof dorm-room observers like ourselves who got sucked in by the raw spectacle. Dan Rather has certainly put in his time tonight—at least eight hours of heavy rambling, enough to make him an MVP—and he's not about to let the coverage turn into the sort of sentimental, self-indulgent crap that ruined the Olympics.

I go to bed at about 4:30 a.m., safe in the knowledge that America's finest sport is alive and kicking, and feeling privileged to be around for one of its finest and most intense moments. My roommate stays up another hour, and in the morning he informs me that at around 5 a.m. the CBS studio caught fire. Dan Rather, in true MVP form, took it in stride. Eliot Rose, SM '03, is A&E editor of the Herald.

Graphic by Eugene Wong.

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