Fox: Just "a standard election"

Fox News' talking heads comb desperately through the night's rubble and ashes in search of a blackened emblem of symbolic victory.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Arts & Entertainment, Fox News, Arts & Entertainment TV Features, 2006 Elections

Nov. 8, 2006 | If you tuned in to Fox News on Election Night hoping for a massive dose of schadenfreude, hoping to see a set littered with bloated bodies and empty bottles of insecticide, hoping for wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, as I did, you were disappointed. Sure, the mood on Fox was grumpy and a little depressed as the scale of Republican defeat mounted. There was denial. There was bargaining. There was lashing out. There was an apparition of the undead. There was a wacky racially coded moment. There was cannibalism (if only among liberals). But I could have encountered most of that in certain relatives' houses, where the drinks would have been better and the oaths more colorful.

Fox has never been so boring. For most of the evening, Brit Hume had the bemused, faintly condescending demeanor of the veteran TV newsman who has been reduced to anchoring the weekend local news in Bakersfield or Binghamton. He'd announce that yet another porcine congressional Republican was going down the slippery slide toward a future on K Street, defeated by some heartland Democrat nobody's ever heard of, as if he were discussing the garden show on Palisade Boulevard and the times for Sunday Mass at St. Stanislaus'. The first actual candidate we got to hear thank his family was Joe Lieberman. Yes, it was that boring.

Several of the panelists in Fox's circle of commentators, most notably Mort Kondracke, Fred Barnes and Juan Williams, seemed devoted to combing through the night's rubble and ashes in search of any blackened emblems of moral or symbolic victory. This tone was struck early, when reporter Major Garrett raised the idea that "all these conservative Democrats" riding into Congress on the great wave of 2006 might be, well, almost like Republicans, except that they belong to a different party. (Granted, many left-wing Democrats might make the same observation.)

This new crop of Democrats was "going to get to Washington, and they're going to see a bunch of liberals leading their party," Garrett intoned darkly. "It's going to be interesting to watch." One commentator (possibly Bill Kristol, though I'm not sure about that) floated the notion that conservative Democrats like Rep.-elect Heath Shuler, the former NFL quarterback from North Carolina, might not support Nancy Pelosi for the speakership. This meme floated in the air, wistfully, for a second -- might the GOP lose the election but then magically convert those new Democratic members into Republicans? -- and then was abandoned.

One-time right-wing hero Rick Santorum was the first Republican senator to fall, and beyond that first news bulletin his name was not mentioned during the five hours or so I watched of Fox's election coverage. Defeated Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine was barely mentioned either, although his victorious opponent, Rep. Sherrod Brown, was described by Hume, with evident distaste, as a "true-blue liberal" and an "out-and-out liberal." Some point was being made there, but since it seemed to contradict the running theme that only conservative Democrats were winning, it never became clear.

Barnes and Kondracke acted irritated by the whole evening, as if the historic electoral upheaval they were witnessing was essentially a routine event and anyway, dammit, if they didn't make their Georgetown dinner dates on time the merlot would all get drunk by other people (possibly Democrats). Barnes insisted that "there was no ideological component" to the GOP's ever-worsening defeat, and that the widely despised Iraq war was not an ideological issue. That sounds smart until you think about it. In plain English, I think that means: Absolutely everyone has finally grasped that the president is an idiot.

Republican campaign honcho Ken Mehlman came on the show a bit past 9 p.m. EST. Always a graceful bullshitter, he didn't exactly concede defeat, saying, "We're seeing a number of different races that are sending different signals," and, "It's going to be a long and interesting evening." Then he started to talk about bipartisan cooperation, which is something only the losers are interested in.

At that point, the Foxies knew the jig was up. Kristol got giggly. "We could be talking about [a net gain of] 35 to 40 seats" for Democrats, he said with an odd smirk, knowing that was a naughty thing to say on Rupert Murdoch's network. (In fairness, while Kristol may be wrong on nearly every issue of substance, he's a vastly more intelligent person than most of those pinheads.) Barnes could hardly get the words out: "It's a, it's a, it's a chip shot for Democrats to take the House," he added.

Then, as must happen on all Fox News broadcasts, things took a bizarre turn. It was as if the producers suddenly realized that their political movement was about to be cast into the wilderness, that their core viewers were all at home eating their own gizzards, and that changing the mood somehow, anyhow, was mandatory. That meant hearing Brit Hume utter the word "blogosphere" (it's still funny!) and it meant bringing in Michelle Malkin, looking as if she had showed up to fill out an application at the Hawaiian Tropic theme restaurant and sat down at the wrong desk.

Next page: The message of those who just got a can of whup-ass opened all over them