An epic of Dickensian proportion
Critic's Notebook
The serial that was the election starred an enormous and unlikely cast of characters and took place with the backdrop of an expanded media universe.
And so we came to the last day of a serial that lasted nearly two years -- an epic of Dickensian sweep and proportion, full of laugher (hearty, bitter, satirical) and tears (of sorrow, of joy, of frustration), with an enormous cast of characters that a generation ago would have been considered unlikely at best -- the stuff of speculative fiction. A generation? It is a world away from the last election.
This cast comprised not merely the candidates, and the sprawling fields from which they emerged, but the ranks of new and old media, whose job it was to follow them, to analyze their statements and actions, or merely to blow hot air their way. It was a story that into its last hours, when a unanimity of opinion coalesced out of a haze of speculation, and the chatter ran up against the facts, remained almost willfully unpredictable, in spite of an anxious, universal desire to tamp it down.
This story was formed in large part by television and the Internet. We in the print world had our scoops and summations, but overwhelmingly we came to understand these characters as the sum of their walking and talking. This was finally the election where the new media really meant something, not just in terms of organizing, but in the marshaling of images -- it was the year of the embedded video. In this expanded media universe, one could find a number of ways through the story -- you could travel by way of the sort-of-left MSNBC, or the fairly-balanced-to-the-right Fox News, by the Daily Kos or The Corner. But in the end, all roads led to the shores of Lake Michigan.
In spite of Obama's stable lead in the polls, the day dawned with the contest very much alive. The early part of the day was quiet ("We're not going to yell at each other today," said Fox News' Shepard Smith), devoted to rehashing, and slicing and dicing imagined numbers. It was not yet a time not for reflection, because no one quite knew what there was to reflect upon. The partisans were upbeat for their sides -- the early morning stories were all about the lines, and at times the lack of lines (which was also a story about early voting); the candidates were seen at their polling places. In Colorado Springs, John McCain took a hoarse last fling before his crowd: "I think we ought to hear one more time: 'Drill, baby, drill.' " Joe the Plumber gave CNN's Rick Sanchez possibly his last interview.
