Daydreams of Elections Past

Let's go for two posts in one day; it's been dead around here lately.

Last night I finally watched Recount, HBO's 2008 film recounting (pardon the pun) the events in Florida in the 36 days following the 2000 presidential election. None of it was new to me, as I was already painfully familiar with the events of that historic 6 weeks. I just hadn't thought about them in years.

In some ways, watching the movie brought back some personal memories. Election Year 2000 is the moment I pinpoint as the time when I became politically aware. It was the first election in which I had a horse in the race and the first election in which I had determined which political party aligned with my understanding of the world. Recount opens with some real footage from Election Night 2000: Tim Russert with his whiteboard stressing the importance of Florida, Dan Rather and his barrage of bizarre but amazingly entertaining aphorisms, Tom Brokaw sheepishly walking back his network's early call of Florida for Al Gore.

I remember all of it. The exhilaration, watching the early coverage that night, of watching my preferred candidate (the first real political preference of my young life) seemingly headed for victory giving way to the excitement and confusion of that night. Florida goes for Gore, then Florida goes for Bush, then Florida is too close to call. Al Gore's concession call to George W. Bush, followed by his call to retract his concession (and the resulting popularization of "snippy"), and the cancellation of his late night concession speech. I can't recall for sure if my obsession with news coverage and my love affair with C-Span began that night but I suspect it may have. I was up all that night, glued to the coverage of that memorable night, not wanting to risk missing its resolution while I slept. Of course, as we know, there was no danger of that.

But watching the movie--as well as reading the comments in this post about the media coverage of Gore in 2000 over at The Monkey Cage--also reminded me of some of the 2000 campaign itself. The triviality of much of it, the relentless attempts to paint Gore as boring and, worse, some sort of pathological liar over willful distortions of his words (given the sheer volume of whoppers we're being subjected to this cycle about real policy issues of import, not dissections of the precise role one candidate played in securing support for the research that led to the development of the Internet, the more bitterly laughable it seems).

But even more than that, the remembrance of the palpable sense in some quarters that the country was on autopilot and who it put at the helm didn't matter. The false exuberance at the tail end of the Clinton years that lulled many into thinking peace and prosperity are easy. The conviction that, as Ralph Nader suggested, there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference" between Bush and Gore or the Republicans and Democrats.

I didn't believe that then and I don't believe it now.

But we don't get do-overs. We can't get back the lost decade that saw zero net job creation and declining median incomes and ended with us trying to claw our way out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. We can't get back the blood and treasure lost in the deserts of Iraq. We can't erase the torture conducted in our names. Nor can we forget the mistakes and failures of the Democrats in their minority role as the loyal opposition. We can't get back the lost opportunities.

But despite all this, watching Recount wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it might be (not that I didn't expect it to be entertaining and well-done, which it is). That was a long time ago and there's not much use in dwelling too much on what might've been. I find my mind wandering to Obama's '12 campaign theme: "Forward." We can't do 2000 over. But we can do 2012 and beyond right.

So I suppose the moral is: elections matter. Make sure you're registered to vote.