TV networks' pundits seek to make sense of vote tallies

If Election Day is when "the people speak," by election night the nation's TV commentators are the ones doing most of the yapping. But as one of the topsiest-turviest presidential votes in history rolled deep into the wee hours of Wednesday, the networks' priority was figuring out who won. The smarter pundits didn't waste their breath trying to tell us what it all meant. "Speechless," muttered CNN's Jeff Greenfield just minutes after CNN joined all the other networks in putting Florida back in the "too close to call" column. That came an hour after the networks declared Texas Gov. George W. Bush the winner of Florida and thus the presidency. Not. As Rob Reiner, a movie director and backer of Vice President Al Gore, joked to CNN's John King around 3:45 a.m. Wednesday: "You basically said 'Dewey Wins' twice tonight." Hours earlier, it seemed that CNN was the place to be. Led by analysts Greenfield and Bill Schneider and reporters King and Candy Crowley, CNN proved again why it has the smartest, fairest, best-informed team coverage on TV. Watching CNN, you couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement of the vote-counting and even take a little satisfaction that the election was turning out to be as whisper-close as advertised. But CNN also declared winners aggressively, tallying up electoral totals for Bush and Gore faster than any other network. That set the stage for, of all people, Dan Rather at CBS to seize what was quickly becoming an out-of-control story and try to make sense of it before anyone else. Rather was Rather all night, laying on the corn pone extra thick. "Bush has run through Dixie like a boll weevil through a cotton field," he said around 8 p.m. A few minutes later he added, "It's been back and forth all night, the kind of night you tell your grandkids about," which sounded silly at the time but turned out to be highly perceptive. Where Rather earned his gold star was in the evening's third act, starting around 2 a.m. Wednesday, an hour or so after TV had declared Bush the new president. "Hold onto the bedstead, folks," Rather said. His staff had just learned that, instead of winning Florida handily, Bush led Gore by just 629 votes. Rather quickly confirmed the rapidly shrinking gap by finding his way to the Internet site where the state's vote counters had posted the new data. He instantly grasped the meaning of the new numbers. "We could be going to Recount City," he said. "None of this television mumbo jumbo and computer data." While other networks barely comprehended the news at first, CBS reporters fed information to Rather, keeping him several steps ahead of the pack. It was a shining moment for Rather and CBS, though ABC's Peter Jennings - who earlier doubted that Bush had sewn up Florida so soon - also responded well. Certainly Jennings had the sexier set, an expensive new Times Square studio that made him look as if he was host of a fancy election-night cocktail party instead of news coverage. NBC's Tom Brokaw spent much of the night recalling the good old days on the "Today" show and tossing off such bon mots as, "In the Electoral College, the tuition is very high, and it's all pass-fail." But when it really counted, Brokaw flunked. When Florida went up for grabs a second time, Brokaw erroneously declared, "If it goes to Al Gore, (he) still has to win Wisconsin or Oregon to be the new president." Fox News inexplicably lagged a few minutes behind all night. In a couple of state races, its projections were as much as two hours behind. It was that kind of night for Fox, whose election team seemed strangely cut off from the outside world in an eerily quiet studio. And NBC's decision to offer competing coverage on its cable outlet MSNBC seemed ill-advised. Once, Tim Russert was reviewing exit polls that showed Hillary Rodham Clinton scoring big with women voters in New York - just as Forrest Sawyer was doing the same on MSNBC. >>>