Truth - Al Franken [5]
As I traveled through the dawn, a million thoughts went through my head. I never remember my dreams when I wake up, so I can’t tell you what they were, although I’m pretty sure my teeth crumbled at some point.
We arrived at our New York studios at ten. Though we stank, there would be no time to shower before our broadcast. There is nothing unusual about this, but I wanted to mention it anyway in the interest of full disclosure. That’s the difference between us and them. As I scanned the newspapers and the Internet, wheels in my head turned. Was there a way to pull the baby out of this burning building? Was there a way to land this plane in the fog? Kerry was only 136,000-odd votes short in Ohio, and his camp contended that up to 250,000 provisional ballots had yet to be counted. “I’ve been in worse jams,” I told Katherine with false bravado. If 20 percent of the provisional ballots were invalidated, we would need to win only 86 percent of what remained. This was doable. Things were looking up.
At 11:10 A.M., the Kerry campaign, looking at the same numbers we were looking at but through slightly less rose-colored goggles, announced that Senator Kerry had called President Bush to concede. The baby was staying in the fire. The plane had flown into some high-tension power lines and burst into flames itself.
All my work had been for nothing.
I took a slug of Jim Beam and headed to the studio. It would be the most difficult show anyone had ever attempted. Still, my indefatigable sense of humor rescued the day. Katherine looked on with admiration as I opened the broadcast:
It’s Wednesday, November 3, and The Al Franken Show is on the air. First, the good news: Ralph Nader did not swing a single state. As for the bad news, that’s why we invented the Oy Yoy Yoy show. Joining us for wailing and gnashing of teeth, we’ve got New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, New York Observer writer Joe Conason, and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norm Ornstein. We’re putting the gallows back in gallows humor—as The Al Franken Show starts now.
Home run. Thank God I was on the air. The healing had begun.
Kerry’s concession speech was beautiful. Bush’s, however, was hardly a concession speech at all. It made me sick. But even worse was Cheney’s speech introducing Bush. The dust had not yet settled on the most narrow election victory by an incumbent president in the history of the republic. Bush’s edge was 2.5 percent, smaller even than Woodrow Wilson’s pathetic 1916 victory margin of 3.2 percent. Now, I’m no partisan. But it really chapped my ass when Cheney claimed a “broad nationwide victory” and a “mandate” for Bush’s “clear agenda.”
Mandate? We couldn’t even tell who’d won until the afternoon after the election. In 1936 FDR had a mandate. In 1956 Eisenhower had a mandate. In 1964 Johnson had a mandate. In 1972 Nixon had a mandate. In 1984 Reagan had a mandate. In 1996 Clinton had beaten Dole by 8.5 percentage points. More than three times Bush’s margin. I knew mandates. Mandates were a friend of mine. And you, 2004, were no mandate.
Surely, this pretension to a mandate was just a rhetorical flourish on the vice president’s part. It came in a moment of such palpable joy and excitement that many watching feared that his heart would explode. The vice president knew as well as anyone how close the election had been; we could forgive him a moment’s hyperbole. But surely no one would echo it.
But I had forgotten the right-wing hacks. That same day, Bill Bennett wrote on The National Review Online : “Bush now has a mandate.” Tucker Carlson agreed: “It is a mandate.” Peggy Noonan on Fox’s The Sean Hannity Show3 that night had a similar view: “He has, I would argue, a mandate now.” Hack rag Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol staked