You may not know this, but early TV shows are why George W. Bush and not Al Gore became President.
That’s my theory, anyway. Let me explain. Television exploded on the scene after World War II, and the Federal Communications Commission began issuing licenses.
However, problems developed, mainly, a dispute over how color television would be transmitted. So in 1948, the FCC stopped issuing new licenses. They didn’t issue any more for four years.
Why did that matter? At that point, most large cities, such as Detroit and Washington, D.C., had TV stations. Small towns and rural areas didn’t. Though Al Gore, who was born in 1948, is officially from Tennessee, he really grew up in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where his father was in Congress. George Bush, a year and a half older, grew up in rural Texas. His family may have had money, but they didn’t have TV for awhile.
Al Gore, quintessential baby boomer, grew up with TV. Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy were his hearth gods. The glowing light was always with him. Thus is was that at 2:15 on the morning of November 8, 2000, when the TV networks proclaimed him the loser, Al Gore bowed to the gods he had always known.
He did not check with his experts, who could have told him that a computer error had subtracted 30,000 votes from his column.
No. TV had spoken. Gore called Bush and conceded defeat. Within an hour or so, he took it back. But the damage had been done.
Television had proclaimed him a loser. Now he was a sore loser. Never mind that he won the popular vote by far more than John F. Kennedy had. Never mind that more people in Florida clearly intended to vote for him.
Today George W. Bush is president, and Al Gore is with a group of kids in a basement in San Francisco, trying to reinvent . . . TV.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Jack, do mean Al Gore is like the guy from the HBO 90s show "Dream On"?
What about Jimmy Carter and his comments this week that Al Gore did win and the legal wrangling to the supreme court took us all for a bumpy ride down the wrong Texas highway?
Posted by: Geoffrey Owen | October 14, 2005 at 03:35 PM