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Are you ready for some politics? Brew some coffee for a late night!
Don’t look for an early end to tonight’s political melodrama.
Even if the California primary is not a close call on both ballots, the polls don’t close until 10 p.m. our time — 8 p.m. on the West Coast. But pundits are predicting a very close race between Mitt Romney and John McCain on the Republican side and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side. California could be a cliffhanger.
So plan on a long night if you’re one of those election junkies (that would be me) who has to watch returns until the last race is called.
There should be some early results as well from the East Coast, so we’ll have something to fill in on our home tally sheets.
Super Tuesday has turned into such a hot ticket that only Fox of the major broadcast networks is not covering the returns. Fox will run crawls if results come in during “American Idol” (tonight is the Atlanta auditions), but the network is counting on election fiends tuning into its cable news channel.
ABC is taking all three hours of prime time for its coverage, anchored by Charles Gibson. Katie Couric and CBS, which originally planned one hour of coverage, has expanded to two (8-10 p.m.), but NBC, led by Brian Williams, is sticking with its 9 to 10 p.m. hour — apparently not wanting to deprive fans of the scheduled two-hour “Biggest Loser” episode.
Hunker down to one of the three cable news networks if you don’t want to worry about switching channels or waiting for crawls over entertainment programming. This is what cable news does best — live breaking news that lasts more than an hour.
It might not be the Super Bowl, but Super Tuesday, for those of us who are totally enthralled by the race for the White House, is “event programming.”
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By Winchester
February 6, 2008 9:08 AM | Link to this
Watched CBS, and made some amazing discoveries. There are apparantly no minorities voting in the GOP, because every breakdown by ethnicity was limited to the Dems. Even more stunning was the age breakdown within a demographic. Hispanic voters under 30, and Hispanic voters over 60. I must deduce that no Hispanics between the age of 30 and 60 voted. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Given some time anyone can make any number say what ever they want.