....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I am thrilled the election is finally over and done with. Except it isn't; we have to do the entire thing over again come November. What I want to know is why we have to hold two elections to pick one guy to be president? And why do they call it a "Primary"? Isn't a primary the main thing? We should call the spring elections "Preliminaries", except that would be too accurate for television.
When I rant about truth in politics I am not ranting about the politicians. Asking them to be truthful is like asking a Hollywood agent to admit they don't actually do anything. My beef is with political coverage on television. There's too much of it. My mother taught me it always takes less time to tell the truth and I'm willing to bet the TV political guru's couldn't fill the cable and airways with endless hours promoting their coverage of "Semi-Super Tuesday", or "Preliminary Decision 2000".
I blame Howard Engstrom for a lot of this. Engstrom was the guy who designed UNIVAC, which was not a household appliance. His Universal Automatic Computer was the world's first commercial laptop and was about the size of a San Fernando Valley tract home. UNIVAC had a two bit memory, its RAM was huge rolls of magnetic tape and its ROM was a couple of thousand glass vacuum tubes. It used as much power as Cincinnati on a Saturday night and it actually looked like the start of a revolution. The behemoth was sold to the Census Department in 1946, and if it had stayed there we would be living in a better world today. Unfortunately television decided to spice up its coverage of the 1952 presidential election by letting UNIVAC pick the winner.
The Gallup and Roper polls both insisted that Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat and man of the people, was going to beat Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican. But UNIVAC liked Ike by a landslide. The pundits refused to believe it so in their reports they hedged the numbers UNIVAC spit out. Come the morning after UNIVAC was proved right and the pundits had been wrong yet again.
No self respecting pundit has been without a computer since. Thanks to the abuse of Howard Engstrom's invention we now know how all short, black, gay, male Catholics voted on Semi-Super Preliminary Tuesday and the political pontificators will spend the next 7 months crunching the numbers and predicting how they will vote come November. And to tell you the truth, I don't care. I have too much trouble making up my own mind to worry about how somebody else is going to vote. Maybe I should just ask the pundits what I think. Thanks to Howard Engstrom, they think they know everything. At least they talk like they do.
If the truth be told the TV pundits only tell you what they want you to think. Even with computers a thousand times faster, smaller and smarter than UNIVAC they still have no idea what is going to happen come November. But you can't promo ignorance. Can you?