Odds and Ends

Memories of 2000

The very first time I started to seriously follow a U. S. Presidential election, it fortuitously also happened to be the most exciting election yet. It was 2000, and I was a student at a state university that technically lay between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh but that really lay in the middle of nowhere. Around us were towns that voted staunchly Republican; the university itself, though, was a more even arena, with the natural liberalism of college students coming up against the conservative tendencies of the immediate surroundings.

We'd heard throughout the campaign season about the incredible woodenness of Al Gore and the gee-whiz charm and likeability of George W. Bush, so in retrospect, perhaps it is stunning that Gore even got as close as he did. On Election Day, as voting progressed, students began to cut classes and gather in the student lounges to watch the results unfold on television. It was politics as spectator sport.

By evening, the main lounge of the Hetzel Union Building was awash in students and jackets and backpacks, and the two big-screen televisions began to resemble movie screens showing a particularly gripping film. In the subsequent hours, news anchors would contradict themselves, television projections would get many numbers wrong, Florida swung between decided and undecided, and debates would break out between students in various parts of the lounge. It was like the Twenty20 final going down to the absolute last ball. I finally went to bed past midnight, convinced that when I woke up, everything would have been settled one way or another.

It wasn't, of course; when I went online the first thing next morning, I couldn't find any news of a resolution. The drama would continue for a few weeks more, and as if delighted at the prospect of debating and arguing for just that while longer, the College Republicans and College Democrats fell on each other with renewed rhetorical vigour. I remember my routine, during that time, as if it were yesterday. Every morning I'd walk to the Union Building, collar free copies of the New York Times, USA Today and the Daily Collegian, get myself a bagel and a whacking great cup of coffee, and devour the newspapers for the next couple of hours. It was my crash course in American electoral politics, and really, I couldn't have had a better one.

The human imagination is a powerful tool, but it is difficult to even begin to conceive of a world where the final result was different, where it was President-elect Gore who faced the challenges of 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq (if indeed this was regarded as a challenge by his administration; I suspect otherwise), climbing oil prices, climate change, and the financial crisis. Most of those challenges will now need to be faced by Bush's successor, and the real business of governance will begin only after he takes office early next year. But the drama begins today, and if the news is anything to go by, we may have nearly as exciting a contest as the one we had in 2000.