Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Whew!

Wednesday November 8, 2000

Assuming Florida goes to Bush, when it was all said and done, George W. Bush was elected President of the United States. Just as predicted here.

It was unbelievably close. That was not predicted here. It wasn't predicted in anywhere in Austin yesterday morning as the general chatter was that Bush would start out strong and sweep to an early victory.

Florida universities might be numbers 2, 3, and 4 in the national college football rankings, but the State of Florida is number one in Austin this morning.

Florida's 25 electoral votes, first given to Al Gore on the basis of exit polling, were sent back to the toss-up column after Bush chief strategist Karl Rove got on the phones and made the twin points that the polls in the Florida panhandle - which is in the central time zone - had not yet closed, and there were about one million absentee ballots outstanding.

After some scratching of heads and surprised studying of U.S. maps, one-by-one the nets withdrew their calls and put Florida back into the mix.

I happened to have walked into the large tent which housed the filing center for the national press corps at the moment CNN announced on the large TV sets. The joyous cheer from the huge crowd in front of the Texas State Capital was almost drowned out by the clicking of "backspace" keys from over 100 laptops as reporter after reporter had to recast the lead paragraph of their stories.

All afternoon cell phones were beeping with the news that Gore was slightly ahead in Florida but there appeared to be "something wrong" with the projections. Some calls had it that the panhandle had been ignored. Others had the story that the Tampa-St. Pete area was underreported. Still others reminded that exit polls - by definition - only count people leaving a polling place. Hence the term, "exit poll."

Exit polls are taken by selecting representative precincts in each state which should - in sum - be representative of each of those states as a whole. Real people are hired and dispatched to go to those polling places and are instructed to ask every fifth voter - or every seventh voter - how they voted and why.

Obviously if you vote absentee you will not leave a polling place and can't be interviewed because you never went to a polling place in the first place.

As the Gore campaign begins to whine down, it will place all the blame for its loss on the candidacy of Ralph Nader. But it was not a surprise that Nader was in the race. It was part of the deal.

That's like complaining your team would have won if your quarterback hadn't gotten hurt. Or that you could have retired if you had sold Priceline at $160. He did and you didn't.

What the campaign of Al Gore will really should be kicking about, is having lost the two home states of this administration: Arkansas and Tennessee.

Democrats were so certain of taking control of the U.S. House six weeks ago that Minority Leader for Life Dick Gephardt was all but measuring for drapes in the Speaker's suite.

Republicans hang on to the House.

The Senate, which was not in play until recently, suddenly became everyone's "shocker-of-the-day" was that the GOP could win the Presidency and retain the House, but could lose the Senate.

Republicans hang on to the Senate, too.

Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, said the legacy of Bill Clinton is this: He took office in 1993 with the Democrats in control of the House, Senate and White House. Bill Clinton will leave office having lost control of the House, Senate and White House for the first time in a half century.

There is one person on the planet who ran the day-to-day activities which resulted in changing control of the House of Representatives and, assuming Florida holds, changing control of the White House: Maria Cino.

Maria was the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1994 when the GOP took control for the first time in 40 years. She was sent up to Washington, DC last summer from Austin to take control of the Get Out The Vote effort for the Bush campaign.

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