Anyone with cable or satellite has more election eve watching options than you can shake a stick. Unfortunately most of them involve morons yelling at each other and until a few days before the election I wasn’t sure which pack of morons I was going to grit my teeth and suffer through. Then, last Thursday, I was reading FiveThirtyEight.com and came across a video of Dan Rather interviewing one of the site’s two main contributors, Nate Silver. For regular FiveThirtyEight readers the interview didn’t contain any new information, but at the end was a promo for Rather’s election night coverage on HDNet. This sentence caught my attention, “We can’t promise you fancy touch screens or glitzy graphics, but we can promise you that we’ll let our guests finish their sentences.” As soon as I heard that I knew which channel I would be watching on election night. They didn’t disappoint.
Rather hosted the evening from a central chair with a rotating cast of two people on either side of him. Some of the names were familiar to me, some of them weren’t, but all of them were political professionals with long experience working for campaigns, and not one of them was sporting the word “strategist” or “consultant” as a title. Here’s how they were described in the HDNet press release:
Those guests include Terry Nelson, who was Political Director for Bush/Cheney 2004 and the first of John McCain’s Campaign Managers in 2008; Dahlia Lithwick, who is the Senior Editor of Slate Magazine; and George LeMieux, who served as Chief of Staff to Florida Governor Charlie Crist and who also writes “The LeMieux Report,” analyzing key business and political issues in Florida. Also joining the broadcast is Drew Westin, political psychologist and author of “The Political Brain,” who studies they way voters make decisions.
Doesn’t that look like a nice guest list? Not a single nationally famous pundit trying to get in one more zinger, just a couple of writers with long political experience and a couple of politicos. Even better, Rather lived up to his tag line; no one interjected to score a debate point, they didn’t all laugh uproariously at each other’s bad jokes and whenever one of them started to speak they were allowed to finish their thoughts even if it took a minute or more. It was calm, rational and sober analysis, the antithesis of the NFL Sunday Countdown pre-game show atmosphere on the cable news channels and their network brethren.
The broadcast wasn’t flawless by any means. Rather is now seventy-seven and his age is showing, he can’t transition from one topic to another seamlessly and he frequently misspoke in a way they he didn’t used to. There were some minor technical problems as well; his usual program on HDNet isn’t done live and there were several times where the camera angle was wrong or an incorrect graphic would be displayed. But these are minor trifles.
The whole thing was a wonderfully sane and relaxed acknowledgement of the reality that things don’t happen that fast on election night. Yes, at the top of an hour a bunch of states close their polls and can be called, and yes in between those times some states can be reliably called as well. But in the meantime there is a lot of downtime and it was a pleasant viewing experience to see non hyperactive political professionals allowed to explain what they were seeing and what they thought. In short, Dan Rather’s HDNet election eve broadcast was television coverage done right, the most calm and informative election broadcast I can recall watching in years. The only real downside is the unfortunate reality that it probably isn’t the start of a trend.
