In the hours leading up to Nov. 7 all the indicators were shorting out. It appeared Al Gore was making a late surge, but was it too late? Not even his top advisers could tell. After making a late round of calls to both camps I went on the air with a notebook full of anecdotes, statistics, historical tidbits and other chaff from the campaign. I was prepared for a long night of surprises–but little did I know the first big surprise would be self-inflicted. Since 1980 we’ve been making state-by-state forecasts of results based on a combination of polls of voters exiting the booths and the actual vote count in selected precincts. I am always a little anxious about this exercise, but the system has been all but fail-safe.
Until this time. When we awarded Florida to Gore shortly before 8 p.m., our analysts were confident based on the data available. They were more worried about the calls coming up in Pennsylvania and Michigan. By now the world knows all the networks were wrong not once but twice about Florida. As I said on election night, “We just don’t have egg on our face. We have an omelet.” It was acutely embarrassing, and we’re still sorting out exactly what happened and why. I take some small comfort in the public reaction, which seems to be more disappointed than angry.
I went on the “Today” show straight from the election-night set to try to explain all we’d been through. I counseled patience. But the fact is I had no idea what the next five weeks would bring. I quickly became a willing hostage in the newsroom, dusting off The Federalist Papers while we dispatched squads of reporters, producers and technicians to Florida. My notebook with the mobile-phone numbers of senior operatives in the Bush and Gore camps took on a biblical quality.
It wasn’t all business. Bill Daley shared the welcome relief of his son’s wedding in the middle of all this. Jim Baker and I talked fly-fishing and our mutual interest in the West. Don Evans, Bush’s longtime friend and campaign chairman, wondered when and how he would reclaim a normal life. Gore called several times to volunteer his off-the-record impressions. He was unfailingly cheerful, so much so that I finally asked how he defined fun. He quickly responded that after President Clinton’s experience he didn’t go public with his definitions.
I told younger colleagues (they all seem to be not only younger but smarter) that this is what it was like for two years during Watergate, which I covered as a White House correspondent. But in our new world of nonstop cable news there was a significant difference for broadcast journalists. They had almost no breathing space as they raced from site to site, broadcast to broadcast, speed-dialing their mobile phones, updating local, state and federal court action, recount standards and dueling news conferences. During Watergate I had 12 hours between “Nightly News” and “Today” to work the phones, think about what I wanted to say, rewrite a story. Given the voracious appetite of all news, all the time, the rising generation doesn’t really have that opportunity. And as we learned during the Lewinsky scandal and again on election night, the temptation to be first in this white-hot environment can lead to trouble.
The all-news, all-the-time milieu isn’t going away, but we don’t have to give up the old rules in this new world. Get it first but get it right. Send smart reporters who can quickly spot facts in a maze of distractions. The night of the climactic U.S. Supreme Court decision I felt like a headmaster grilling two star students as Dan Abrams and Pete Williams stood in the cold on the steps of the court ripping through the lengthy and complex decision. Some late-night comics have mocked the spectacle of journalists reading the opinion in real time, but our reporters got to the relevant sections in heart-stopping fashion and then explained them in clear, calm tones. A memorable moment; it’s what we’re supposed to do.
