The Morning After

In the end, Brit Hume broke the news, just like four years ago.

Ohio was sitting out there all night until Fox called it for Bush at 12:41 this morning, putting him four electoral votes from victory. NBC followed suit 19 minutes later.

But unlike in 2000, when the other networks all rushed to join Fox in giving Florida, and the presidency, to Bush, CBS, ABC and CNN hung back, and Bush still hasn't reached 270 on their maps.

"It may come down to how one swing state swings -- Ohio," Dan Rather said at 1:30. But Fox and NBC were saying it had already swung.

Even though Kerry, at this writing, hasn't conceded and still harbors hopes about Ohio, nearly everyone in the press has gone ahead and written their how-Bush-won pieces. There isn't the sense, as in 2000, of having no idea how this thing is going to turn out, or a feeling that the Democrats were being robbed (although that could change as the maneuvering gets under way). This time, Bush is the popular-vote winner. The media verdict is that both sides turned out their vote and Bush won a narrow victory.

"The country still doesn't have a president," CNN's Heidi Collins said this morning (although Bush would serve until Jan. 20 regardless). On the other hand, the New York Post, along among the papers, I checked, says "Bush Seals Second Term in White House."

There's no question that the exit polls convinced many in the punditocracy that it could be a big night for Kerry, just as the figures briefly pointed to a Gore win four years ago. But the actual vote, which seemingly took forever to count, didn't match the pollsters' numbers.

So let's go to the election analyses, even as the Ohio wrangling continues to unfold, and then I'll review the TV coverage.

The New York Times: "From beginning to end, this election was about George W. Bush, and he can claim that an apparently insurmountable lead in the popular vote vindicated his policies, his persistence, his personal qualities and his political strategy. He bet that voters who had shared a traumatic terrorist attack and two wars on his watch would stand by him, and they appeared to.

"A president who won by a whisker four years ago, then governed as if he had a landslide, was within striking distance of an electoral vote mandate for a second term. He picked up Republican, and conservative, seats in a still-divided Senate, and support for his stance against gay marriage in states where ballot measures banning it won approval.

"In an election marked by divisiveness to the bitter end, much remained clouded early this morning: John Kerry's camp maintained that he could yet win pivotal Ohio and close the gap, and that uncertainties in Iowa and New Mexico might be resolved in his favor.

"But in sweet redemption, Mr. Bush exorcised the ghost of the Florida recount by winning a decisive victory in that state where his brother is governor and bid fair to become the only son of an American president ever to be elected president himself, then win a second term, and thus escape the curse of John and John Quincy Adams."

The Los Angeles Times: "With Republicans maintaining control of both chambers of Congress, Bush could be in position to aggressively press his agenda if the final states fall his way.

"Whichever way the race tilts in the end, the result in the presidential race appears to have changed remarkably little from the historically narrow split in 2000. When all the votes are counted, it appears possible that as few as three or four states may switch from one party to the other since the last election. . . .

"Exit polls gauging voter sentiment showed that though he continued to enjoy overwhelming support from his conservative base, he had made only limited progress at expanding his reach among voters beyond it. Just as in 2000, Bush on Tuesday mobilized a massive coalition of culturally conservative Americans, centered on married families, rural voters, and people who own guns or attend church regularly, according to a nationwide Times exit poll of voters leaving polling places."

The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Candidate George W. Bush pledged four years ago to govern as 'a uniter, not a divider,' but it was clear Tuesday, as voters cast ballots, that the nation he has governed since 2001 still remains divided.

"Nevertheless, President Bush appeared to have a slim advantage over John Kerry early Wednesday morning. Bush, if ultimately victorious, will not have garnered overwhelming popular support, but his survival, in the midst of so much acrimony, would be widely viewed as a testament to his competitive drive and political skills. . . .

"The strategy, which was designed to break the 50-50 deadlock and bring him a solid majority of the electorate, required: a quick and relatively bloodless war in Iraq (thereby burnishing his commander-in-chief credentials), a booming economy with major job growth (sparked by his big tax cuts), a major victory on health care (thereby stealing a Democratic issue), and an internally divided Democratic party.

"Yet he was close to a narrow victory Tuesday night with virtually no help on any of those fronts. He was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of private-sector jobs, and he had to defend a war that was based on rationales that were subsequently undercut by U.S. weapons inspectors and the Sept. 11 commission. . . . In short, the 2004 electorate was, once again, a portrait of polarization."

The Washington Post: "Four years later, it is still a divided country -- perhaps more sullenly than ever -- but as a long election night bled into morning the evidence was clear that it is becoming a more Republican one.

"President Bush, his fate for winning a second term still officially uncertain, commanded the popular-vote majority that eluded him in 2000. And in an impressive run of battleground states, he seemed to win validation for a campaign that unabashedly stressed conservative themes and reveled in partisan combat against Democratic nominee John F. Kerry."

Slate's William Saletan has a simple explanation:

"If you're dissatisfied with Bush -- or if, like me, you think he's been the worst president in memory -- you have a lot of explaining to do. Why don't a majority of voters agree with us? How has Bush pulled it off?

"I think this is the answer: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

"Bush is a very simple man. You may think that makes him a bad president, as I do, but lots of people don't -- and there are more of them than there are of us. If you don't believe me, take a look at those numbers on your TV screen.

"Think about the simplicity of everything Bush says and does. He gives the same speech every time. His sentences are short and clear. 'Government must do a few things and do them well,' he says. True to his word, he has spent his political capital on a few big ideas: tax cuts, terrorism, Iraq. Even his electoral strategy tonight was powerfully simple: Win Florida, win Ohio, and nothing else matters. All those lesser states -- Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire -- don't matter if Bush reels in the big ones.

"This is what so many people like about Bush's approach to terrorism. They forgive his marginal and not-so-marginal screw-ups, because they can see that fundamentally, he 'gets it.' They forgive his mismanagement of Iraq, because they see that his heart and will are in the right place. And while they may be unhappy about their economic circumstances, they don't hold that against him. What you and I see as unreflectiveness, they see as transparency. They trust him.

"Now look at your candidate, John Kerry. What quality has he most lacked? Not courage -- he proved that in Vietnam. Not will -- he proved that in Iowa. Not brains -- he proved that in the debates. What Kerry lacked was simplicity. Bush had one message; Kerry had dozens. Bush had one issue; Kerry had scores. Bush ended his sentences when you expected him to say more; Kerry went on and on, adding one prepositional phrase after another, until nobody could remember what he was talking about."

The New Republic's Ryan Lizza had predicted 300 electoral votes for Kerry -- conceding he might look silly in a few hours -- but the link is mysteriously not working.

The Chicago Tribune's Ellen Warren goes to the hottest TV show around:

" 'I didn't realize faking this thing was going to be so much work,' Jon Stewart told me after his live Election Night one hour special on Comedy Central's Daily Show. Now, he thinks that us 'real' news types aren't such wussies after all.

" 'My respect has gone up drastically for the actual people who have to stay there all night," he said, arriving at Comedy Central's Election Night party in Chelsea. 'Luckily, we ran out of material so we just called the show and walked away,' he said."

And here's the bleary-eyed report I finished in the middle of the night after too many hours of TV-watching:

Fox News broke ranks with the other networks at 12:41 this morning, projecting President Bush as the winner in the crucial battleground of Ohio and putting him just one electoral vote from winning reelection.

It is "all but impossible" for Sen. John F. Kerry to win, NBC's Tom Brokaw said as his network called Ohio at 1 a.m., even as the other television networks -- CBS, ABC and CNN -- held back on calling a winner in the state.

For most of the night, the networks took a strikingly cautious approach to the presidential race. While ABC News projected Bush the winner in the pivotal state of Florida at 11:38, and CBS followed suit five minutes later, NBC and CNN did not call the state until after midnight, followed by Fox News at 12:21.

For hours after the polls closed in other key battleground states, no network had attempted to call Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan or New Mexico. Instead, they were largely projecting Bush winning a batch of predictably red states and Kerry hauling in some reliably blue ones. But that changed with the Fox call.

The networks made it clear they were far more concerned with not fouling things up, as they did in 2000, than with beating their rivals by minutes with a "scoop" that might backfire. ABC's Peter Jennings raised the issue at the top of "World News Tonight," saying: "Will the cables and the networks get it right this year? We certainly hope so."

Every half-hour or so, the anchors called the easiest states -- Texas for Bush and New York for Kerry at 9, for example -- while passing on predicting the closest contests. Refusing even to characterize who might carry which must-win state, correspondents and commentators spent hours chewing over what-if scenarios. CBS's Dan Rather said his network couldn't make "even an educated guess" in some states because of heavy early balloting and absentee voting. When Rather asked why CBS hadn't called Ohio, analyst Mika Brzezinski said they were waiting on more results from the Cleveland area.

Some networks were more cautious than others, and not just concerning Florida. ABC waited a half-hour longer than some rivals to call Maine for Kerry and South Carolina for Bush, and CNN waited an additional 25 minutes to award the president North Carolina. And while the other networks gave California to Kerry just past 11, Fox waited more than an hour before making the call.

The networks and the Associated Press began receiving exit-poll data in the early afternoon, and Slate.com and the Drudge Report touted the figures as showing Kerry with a slight edge in Florida and Ohio and significant leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. But the tone of the television coverage began to subtly turn against Kerry as the night wore on and it appeared that the senator was not doing as well in the key battlegrounds as the exit polls had indicated.

In an echo of 2000, Lisa Myers reported on MSNBC that the Bush camp saw "a significant flaw in the exit polls." Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry sounded less than confident when he told Jennings that "we're not throwing in the towel" on Florida.

"Somebody should reassess exit polling. . . . It's useless," said CNN's Tucker Carlson.

There was no shortage of spinning. Bush talked to his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, reported NBC's David Gregory, and "one adviser tells me they are making a strong comeback" there. And when Bush allowed himself to be taped watching the returns with his family in the White House, ABC's George Stephanopoulos said the message was "he's relaxed, he's confident he's going to win." The Kerry camp countered within seconds that Bush looked "nervous," Jennings reported.

Four years after their botched calls in Florida produced the longest night of humiliation in television history, network executives were determined to be far more cautious in predicting the state-by-state outcomes. They later apologized before Congress, dissolved their Voter News Service consortium, hired two new polling firms, tested the upgraded equipment all year and abandoned their practice of "calling" a state after a majority of polls had closed there, which stoked so much controversy when they initially awarded Florida to Al Gore.

NBC's Tim Russert got out his white board, which became famous four years ago, and plotted potential paths to victory with the crucial states outstanding. "George Bush has two or three paths to 270," Russert said, referring to the number of electoral votes needed to win. "John Kerry has one, and it goes through Ohio."