Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History
by By Greenfield, Jeff and Nsn (EDT)
Category: Political Science , Political Process , Campaigns & Elections

Few people know the absurdities of American politics better than Jeff Greenfield, CNN's award-winning political and media analyst. Now for all those millions of Americans who are still trying to figure how we got there, Greenfield takes us behind the scenes to explore Election Night 2000, the campaign that produced it, and the tumultous weeks that followed it, and their surreal glory. From the long election battle itself ("between a candidate who spoke to us as if English were his second language and a candidate who spoke to us as if English was our second language") to November 7 and its famous media flipflops ("Oh, waiter!" Greenfield proclaimed aloud. "One order of crow!") to its hard-fought finale, he leads us through an Alice-in-Wonderland world of butterfly ballots and hanging chads; Nader factors and newsroom hysteria ("You know the woodcut? Munch? The Scream? That's what it was like"); deadlines, Doomsday scenarios, and "Dukakis states"; lawyers, recounts, spin doctors, Skutnicks, glitches, Zones, bad numbers and botched assumptions ("There was no thought - none - given to the possibility that Gore might win the popular and lose the electoral vote," said a Gore insider).