My Defining Days of the Decade: #11

Yesterday, I kicked off my “Defining Days of the Decade” series with number 12, my college graduation day, May 15, 2003.

Today, for number 11 on the list, we’re going back in time to a tremendously memorable event during my sophomore year at USC. Drumroll please…

November 7, 2000: The Election of a Lifetime

In the morning and early afternoon of Election Day 2000, I was a busy guy. As the Daily Trojan Assignment Editor during a semester when there was no City Editor, I was essentially in charge of coordinating the newspaper’s election night coverage. As a political and elections junkie with a passion for being at the center of breaking news, it was a role I took on enthusiastically. But it meant that, pretty much whenever I wasn’t in class on that Tuesday, I was in the newsroom, prepping for that night, trying to make sure everything would go as smoothly as possible. Our layout needed to be ready; all our non-election stories need to be done; we needed to get to the point where we could just fill in the blanks.

Because of this, I didn’t manage to make it to the polls, to cast my own vote — my first-ever vote for President — until pretty late in the day. But finally, by around 4:30 PM, everything was as ready as it could be at the DT. So I headed out to the polling place.

At this point, I should probably pause and point out that, in November 2000, I was a much more ideologically uncomplicated liberal than I am nowadays. So there was never any doubt who I preferred between Gore and Bush. My choice, to the extent I had to wrestle with one, was between Gore and Nader, as the campaign posters on my wall (at left) attest. Dubya never entered into the equation, except as an object of mockery. Twice during the campaign, I listened to Nader speak in person, but I ultimately took the pragmatic route and decided to vote for Gore (whom I also heard speak — see photo at right — thanks to his inexplicable decision to hold a rally in California — CALIFORNIA!! — on November 2, an example of political malpractice by his advisers if ever there was one).

Meanwhile, at least as important to this discussion as my political leanings is the fact that I was (and remain) a serious elections junkie. Having grown up the son of an elections officer for the Connecticut Secretary of the State’s office, I’ve always been a huge nerd for this stuff — in particular, the mechanics of elections, as well as their political side. But all the presidential election nights I’d watched in my young life (1988, 1992, 1996) had been effectively over before the polls even closed on the West Coast. They were all landslides, in other words. This one promised to be different, and I was stoked. Little did I know, of course. Little did any of us know.

Anyway, back to my election-night timeline. Remember, this is California, so it being after 4:30 PM, the polls had already started to close on the East Coast. No results had yet been announced from any of the key swing states — but, as I half-listened to a local AM radio station on my walkman while strolling across campus with my fellow political-junkie friend Dane, the vibes I was getting weren’t good. Listening to the pundits break down the race, I was trying to read the tea leaves and determine, based on their tone and tenor and vague comments about this and that, what the exit polls were showing. This, of course, was before the days of leaked exit polls numbers appearing on Drudge and whipping around the blogosphere in five seconds flat, but that didn’t mean there weren’t leaked exit poll numbers — it was just that only a select few had access to them. So you had to listen to the talking heads, and try to guess what they knew that they weren’t telling us. And based on what I was hearing from the pundits on the radio, my guess was: Gore’s losing. They sounded like a bunch of crestfallen liberals. This made me, too, a (provisionally) crestfallen liberal. I think Gore’s gonna lose, I told Dane. The people on the radio aren’t saying it yet, but it doesn’t sound good.

After walking together for a few minutes, Dane and I parted. He, having already voted earlier in the day, was heading back to his apartment; I was heading for the polling place, at the Felix car dealership on Figueroa Street. So we said goodbye, both feeling relatively pessimistic, and I kept on walking, and listening to the radio. I turned onto Figueroa. And then suddenly:

“Breaking news – Al Gore has won the state of Florida.”

This news hit me like a bolt of lightning. I leaped into the air, then pumped my fist two or three times while bounding down the street, all the while shouting “YES! YES!” to anyone and no one. Holy crap. I was wrong. Gore’s winning. Florida was the toughest of the Big Three states everyone said were crucial for him — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. If he’d won the Sunshine State, he was probably gonna be President. I hesitated for a moment, then spun around and started sprinting back toward Dane’s apartment. I had to catch him before he got inside, and be the one to tell him the news.

To get to Dane’s apartment, I had to run past the Shrine Auditorium — and there was a Christina Aguilera concert at the Shrine that night. So there I am, sprinting like a maniac, and probably smiling like a buffoon, running past a long line of girls in sequin dresses and whatnot, none of whom had any idea who won Florida, nor any inclination to care. They probably thought I was on drugs or something. Anyway, I spotted Dane down the street just as he was about to disappear into his apartment and, still within earshot of the Christina Aguilera fans, shouted at the top of my lungs: “DANE!!!!” (He heard and looked at me.) “GORE WON FLORIDA!!!!” He raised his arms in celebration.

Then I turned around and headed back toward the polling place. By this point, it was almost 5:00 PM Eastern. The top of the hour, with poll closings up and down the East Coast, hit as I was waiting in line, and the radio told me Gore had won Michigan, too. OMG. That was 2 out of 3, and surely Pennsylvania would follow. I was casting my ballot for the winner, I thought as I stepped into the booth and confidently, exultantly voted for Gore and Lieberman.

I don’t remember exactly what I did next — I think I had an errand or two to run — but eventually I headed back to the newsroom, ready for a long and exciting night, but thinking it was going to end with the good guys winning. So you can imagine my surprise when I looked at the electoral-vote tally, and saw that Gore had somehow lost votes, slipping from 197 to 172. I asked what the heck was going on. I was told the TV people had retracted the Florida call. The Sunshine State was now up in the air. My initial, wild, ridiculous celebration on Figueroa had been for naught.

The next few hours are something of a blur, as election results and DT article drafts came in, and we tried to get the paper ready for publication. As our usual final cutoff time of 11:00 PM inched closer, it became increasingly clear that we might not know the result in time to put it in the paper. When we printed “final proofs” at around 10:00, the partial headline was, as you can see in the photo at the top of this post, “Election closest in ______.” We tried out different possibilities: “Election excruciatingly close,” “Election breathtakingly close.” We played around with the “closest since Reconstruction” meme (referring to 1876). But mostly, we waited. Who was the winner? When would we know? It was apparent that Florida would decide the election, and folks on TV — and in our newsroom, including some politically inclined non-staff-members who’d come up just to be part of the excitement — were analyzing the results as they came in over the Internet, trying to figure out what was going to happen. But it was impossible to tell.

11:00 PM arrived. Still no final result; still no front-page headline. We convinced the production staff to give us a little bit of extra time. 11:05. 11:10. 11:15. Still no winner in Florida. We were running out of time. We had to put the paper to bed.

And then they called it. Bush had won Florida. Bush was the next president.

After perhaps a few partisan groans (hey, we’re a bunch of liberal journalists-in-training, what do you expect?), this news led to an immediate frenzy of last-minute edits and tweaks, and a final debate over the front-page banner headline. The proof doesn’t even show the one we used, because it occurred to me on a whim, I shouted it out, everyone immediately agreed it was perfect, and it was simply typed straight onto the page on the computer screen. The headline was: “At the eleventh hour, Bush wins.”

We sent the paper off for publication. It was done. The election was over. We had our headline, and Bush was our president-elect.

Once the newsroom drama was over, I allowed myself a moment of unbridled partisan angst, climbing out onto the newsroom’s balcony and shouting, from the fourth floor of the Student Union building out into the empty night, to nobody in particular: “EVERYONE SUCKS!!!” The night had been thrilling, but the end result was depressing: Bush. Bush!! Ugh.

After a good bit of socializing and post-morteming, I packed up and headed for home. It was after midnight (after 3:00 AM on the East Coast) by this point. The walk from the newsroom to Becky’s and my apartment building was 15 or 20 minutes, and we were in no particular hurry. After all, the election was over — there were no new results to rush back for. So we ended up having a lengthy, half-hour conversation with the editor-in-chief in our underground garage. I wasn’t listening to my radio anymore, and I didn’t have a cell phone back then, so I was completely out of touch with what was happening in the election. By the time we finally strolled into Becky’s apartment, it was after 1:00 AM (after 4:00 AM back east).

We walked in to find several of our usually non-politically-inclined friends huddled around the TV, staring at it as intently as if they were watching the final, decisive play of the Super Bowl. But they were watching the news. About the election. What’s going on? I asked. One of them turned to me and, with an utterly thunderstruck look on her face, said: “They took back Florida. It’s too close to call.”

Rarely have I felt such an instant surge of intense, diametrically opposed emotions. On the one hand: OMG! Gore might win! Maybe everyone doesn’t suck! … On the other hand: The newspaper is wrong! Our headline is wrong! Noooooo!!! At the twelfth hour, Bush didn’t win! We’d have been better off if we’d put the stupid thing to bed at 11:00, instead of waiting the extra 20 minutes!

We all remember what came next: 34 days of counting and recounting, uncertainty and doubt, argumentation and litigation, overheated talk of a “constitutional crisis,” speculation about Larry Summers or Janet Reno becoming caretaker president, etc. etc., all of it ultimately resulting in the United States Supreme Court effectively ending the recount on December 12 and, for better or worse, anointing Bush the winner.

Rarely, if ever, has there been a more exciting news period in my life. As an election fanatic, this was heaven for me. For years before 2000, my dad and I had speculated about when the next “inversion” between the electoral and popular votes would be — a spectre we could invoke in casual conversation with one another simply by saying, “1888!” And, in the early days after November 7, we indeed referred to the 2000 election as “another 1888.” Then, as the dispute continued, we started referencing “another 1876.” Finally, when SCOTUS stepped in and effectively decided it, we acknowledged that there was simply no precedent to reference anymore. It wasn’t 1888; it wasn’t 1876; it was simply 2000.

As a teenage news junkie growing up in the 1990s, I had often lamented that I had the misfortune of living in a relatively boring time period. If only I’d been young in the 1960s, when things were interesting!, I thought. Of course, I would soon learn — less than a year later — why that ancient Chinese saying about “living in interesting times” is considered a “curse.” But on Election Night 2000, and in the weeks that followed, it felt like the newfound interestingness of my generation’s moment in history was something to celebrate. Sure, my parents’ generation had grown up in a time of profound upheaval and change. But in the course of two years, we’d had the first presidential impeachment since 1868, and now the closest and most contentious election in American history. It was a great time to be a political nerd and news junkie. And November 7, 2000 (bleeding into the wee hours of November 8) is most certainly a day and night I will never forget. Which is why it earns the #11 spot on this list.

Tomorrow: Number Ten!