It’s Election Day. So why shouldn’t my first post be about my glorious voting history, starting with a headline from Radiohead’s “Electioneering?”
First of all, it took me all of four minutes to get in and out of the Lakeside gym where I voted this morning. Where are these lines you people speak of? Not in crime-free Coppell, I can tell you that.
Second, I am not one of those people who encourages everyone to vote. If you have to beg someone to vote, if you have to plead with them to set aside their fantasy teams long enough to learn the difference between Romney and Obama, those people shouldn’t be determining our next President.
I have a very odd voting history. I went more than 20 years without picking a winner. That’s difficult to do if you think about the back and forth between Dems and the GOP in t he White House in recent years. But in many ways it kind of mirrors my World Series and Super Bowl picks. So…there’s that. I’m excited that my daughter voted for the first time this morning in the great state of Missouri. She asked for some tips. I told her to avoid the circle next to Todd Akin’s name but otherwise she was on her own. Even if I’m not particularly in love with either candidate, I still get fired up to watch election returns. There’s s lot of channel surfing involved because the local reports on the hour bore the shit out of me. Who cares about the Railroad Commissioner? I still think of a conductor when I see that on the Texas ballot.
But what I hate about the national coverage is the rush to declare states for one candidate or the other. I think this caused more than a few problems when networks declared Florida for Bush, causing Gore to concede and then an hour late to un-concede.
And in 1984, the coverage began – BEGAN – with networks declaring Reagan had defeated Mondale. Cable was in its infancy then. What were we supposed to do, watch MTV videos for the next three hours?
Take your time. Let us sit back and enjoy it. We are not in that big a hurry to switch to Pistons-Nuggets.
Even those of us with Ty Lawson on our fantasy teams.