Election Coverage

Where were the neo-con Weekly Standard staff on election night? I looked for them online, hoping they'd be live-blogging the election like their conservative cohorts at the National Review, but the Standard's site was cold.

The Standard's editor William Kristol and Freddie "the Beetle" Barnes (as PBS's John McLaughlin liked to call him) were at Fox News helping anchor Brit Hume make sense of the carnage. Where else would they be?

The New York Observer sat in on the coverage:

At 6:45:25 p.m. on Nov. 7, a grandfatherly Brit Hume, the lead anchor of the Fox News Channel's "You Decide 2006" midterm-election coverage, raised his hand, Moses-like, to silence a rant from William Kristol.

Very nice scene setting. However, when you describe a scene in which a news anchor speaks with slience, you lose the chance to use the word "stentorian."

The Fox News team had a sad night. They'd had nothing but "good news" to report since they called the election for Bush ahead of everyone else in the 2000 elections. This was new, uncomfortable territory. I don't have cable, so I missed hearing Fred Barnes compare Republican Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum to Winston Churchill. Santorum lost to his Democratic challenger by a big percentage.

I also missed Dan Rather's goofy delivery of his pre-scripted take on Hillary Clinton's win during his cameo at the Daily Show: "She ran away with it like a hobo with a sweet-potato pie."

I don't know, maybe I was better off getting my punditry from a motley mix of the National Review Online, Fox 5 New York's Ernie, Rosanna, and Congressman Anthony Wiener, and the websites of CNN and the Twin Cities' KARE 11 News.