Rusty Saber: Don't let lawyers pick the next president

This is being written on the Monday following the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, also known as Election Day.

It was to have been written last Wednesday describing my sigh of relief at the end of presidential election campaigning. Alas, the sigh has been delayed. Election Day was supposed to be over, but as Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over till it's over." Hopefully, by the time this is being read, we will know the name of our new president.

Americans want Election Day to be over when it's over. It's like Christmas. We get all wrapped-up in pre-Christmas frenzy; Christmas comes and it's over. We don't want it to stick around. We go on to other things. Likewise, we become engrossed with the presidential campaign hype preceding Election Day; later that evening we gather around the television, the media tells us who the winner is, and we go to bed certain that members of the media know what they are talking about. This time, they did not know what they were talking about.

Not once, but twice, the media "awarded" Florida to the wrong candidate. I went to bed after all major TV networks and the cable news outlets declared that George W. Bush was the president-elect. Like everyone else, I awoke to discover that the media had again gotten it wrong, Election Day had not gone away. Florida was for the third time declared to be "too close to call." The media blew it. Since the media project winners in states after only a small percentage of the votes have been counted, I'm surprised this hasn't happened before.

This mistake caused the people who report the news to become the news. This was no problem for the media when reporting on itself the spin was that the debacle wasn't its fault, it was caused by "faulty data."

As this is being written, turmoil reigns supreme. Florida's vote has been counted, recounted and some counties are being counted for a third time. Several thousand overseas ballots are yet to be counted. Debate rages over what to do about those Florida voters who couldn't figure out that arrows on the ballot pointed to the names of candidates or those who voted for more than one presidential candidate. Lawsuits have been filed, and more are threatened. Recounts in other states have been mentioned.

I hope this chaos abates; the very thought of the selection of the next president of the United States falling into the hands of lawyers is appalling, indeed.

This Rusty Saber column was supposed to be about the hostility of the campaign. However, it's more like the movie "Groundhog Day," in that Election Day refuses go away. The common denominator of all those seemingly conflicting pre-election polls was that the country was divided we just didn't realize how much. Billions of dollars were spent on the campaign, most of it on negative television advertising, which could have been produced, written and narrated by the same people. All ads seemed to begin with an unflattering shot of the opponent, the narrator, speaking in a hushed voice, accusing the opponent of wanting to harm good people. Such a person shouldn't be allowed to walk in the sunshine or breathe the same air as decent people; we certainly shouldn't vote for him. The candidate paying for the ad was good, the opponent was evil.

The opponent's ad looked and sounded the same, except that good and evil changed places. A steady diet of this, along with media pouncing on every campaign event like a school of piranha assaulting a minnow, created more than your ordinary campaign rhetoric; it turned nasty. The nation is split right down the middle.

The vote is so equally divided between both candidates that neither is willing to give up without a legal fight. The negative ads have ended, but it isn't surprising that the vote-counting controversy has turned up the intensity of the already potent political animosity. It isn't surprising that a Japanese newspaper recently referred to the United States as the "Disunited States."

Eventually, Bush or Gore will be declared the winner; then I can breathe my sigh of relief.

However, I'll bet that at this very moment, politicians from both parties are already at work planning to run for president in 2004. Now that thought brings on a sigh of a far different ilk.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University and a Springfield public relations consultant.)