Raise your hand if you actually stayed up to wait for the Iowa caucus results to come in. Aww, folks, come on! You missed one heck of a par-tay, and I'm not talking about ol' Mittens, er, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum popping the corks on their non-alcoholic spritzers over their first and second place finishes. The CNN team lost it on national TV!
Yes, election results coverage got interesting. Finally! And we were all watching Virginia Tech blow in the Sugar Bowl (sniff, sniff, waaaah) instead of Anderson Cooper cut up and drop the h-word.
The thing is, I'm not in the least bit surprised. Elections coverage to me sounds a lot like the adults on the Charlie Brown specials. And I consider myself pretty politically engaged. I know the real names of the candidates and where they stand on most of the important issues. I vote every single November. And yet, I can't say that I actually enjoy elections coverage. Even on that fateful night back in November 2008 when blue was washing over that map, I confess I have to cop to a wee bit of channel surfing.
But the miracle of video playback on the interwebs has proven today that waiting for the numbers to roll in from the caucuses didn't have to be a snoozefest. Anderson laughed! Ali Velshi laughed! Roland Martin laughed! We got information, and they made it lively without screaming, fighting, or name-calling. Bill O'Reilly, are you taking notes? Let's roll the videotape, shall we:
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Ah, so refreshing. News folks who know that we're all a little punchy at 1 a.m., and we don't need to hear "wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk" all the time. We get it, elections are serious matters. But how it was presented wasn't going to change the end result.
Mitt Romney was still going to win, with Rick Santorum nipping at his heels. But if we were so bored we fell asleep before it was official, it kind of deadens the impact, don't you think?
How do you take in elections coverage? Do you bother watching?
Image via CNN