The Best Show on Television
 by Christian Livemore and Stephen Sacco

For our money, the best new TV show this year by far was this thing
called "Election 2000."  It's a wacky send-up of American politics that
focused on a wild presidential race and featured a crazy cast of  characters.

The two main characters were Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, and
George W. Bush, the Republican, otherwise known as the Smart Guy and the
Dumb Guy.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is comedy writing at its finest.
Television hasn't seen contrasting characters like this since Felix and Oscar.
Like the classic Abbott and Costello routines, the Smart Guy and the Dumb Guy
played off of each other beautifully.  The Smart Guy was always citing facts and
figures and talking about something called Dingel-Norwood, and he kept going on
and on about things like education, health care and a lot of other boring stuff.

The Dumb Guy would just roll his eyes and smirk at the Smart Guy.
Then somebody would ask the Dumb Guy a question and he'd say something like,
"I...I...I'm a leader," and "If I'm for it then I'm for it, and if I'm ag'in it, then I'm' not for it."
And he kept mispronouncing words like "subliminable" instead of "subliminal" and
saying things like, "Is our children learning?"

The Dumb Guy has a brother named Neil, who cheated the government out
of millions of dollars a few years back, and they keep shoving him in
the closet and hoping everybody will forget about him.

Then there's the Dumb Guy's father, an ex-CIA director who used to be the President
himself but screwed everything up so bad he lost his re-election to a dope-smoking,
draft-dodging, skirt-chasing trailer park cracker from Arkansas.

The father is always getting the Dumb Guy out of the most ridiculous situations, like the
time he got arrested for drunk driving with his little sister in the car (he was 30 and said
it was" in his youth"; the Dumb Guy is hysterical!), and getting arrested for doing cocaine,
and going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard.  The father even got his son
into Yale even though he's a Dumb Guy.

This stuff is so outlandish, none of it would ever really happen, but it sure makes great television.
In real life, of course, you'd want the Smart Guy to be President.  But this isn't real life, it's TV.
(Thank God.  If the Dumb Guy were actually going to be the President, we'd be in a hell of a fix.)
They're trying to write a comedy show here, and the smart guy isn't half as funny as the Dumb Guy.

They also had a character named Ralph Nader, who was running as the Green Party candidate.
This is some of the best character development in the show.  For years he was a consumer advocate,
fighting big business and protecting the public safety.  He ran for President every election,
but just to make a point, not really expecting to win, just trying to elevate the public debate.
But over time he grew increasingly bitter and resentful at all the money everybody else was making,
so he staged a vanity run in which he charged people by the thousands to hear him speak at
Madison Square Garden and other big stadiums across the country.

So every now and then this Nader character would show up and tell
everybody that there was no difference between the Smart Guy and the Dumb
Guy.  This seemed to really upset the Smart Guy, who went on and on about
the environment and a woman's right to choose.  But the Dumb Guy seemed
to really like this Nader guy and even paid for some of the guy's commercials.

If there is one place in this otherwise very funny show where the
comedy comes up short, it's with the Smart Guy.  The Smart Guy wasn't all
that funny.  He never did anything goofy like the Dumb Guy, who was
always doing something stupid, like mispronouncing words and not knowing
Social Security was a Federal Program.  All the Smart Guy ever did was
talk about the issues.  He had a strong marriage with a lovely woman, and
four beautiful kids who adored him.  I mean, sure he was really smart
and a good family man and obviously more qualified to be President, but
he never had any punch lines.  He must have been the straight man.

In one hilariously funny episode, the dumb guy had this giant band-aid
on his face the whole show.  His aides kept telling everybody that he
had an "unsightly cyst," but you just knew it was really a bruise from
getting into a fist fight with his other brother Jeb, because Jeb
screwed up the vote rigging in his state in the last episode.  Plus you
didn't see Jeb at all for the next two or three episodes, so you just knew
he had a big old black eye and maybe a couple of teeth knocked out.

Another very funny episode focused on the debates.  The Smart Guy kept
trying to get the Dumb Guy to agree to debates, but the Dumb Guy didn't
want to debate.  After a lot of stalling, the Dumb Guy tried to offer
his own debate format.  It was two one-hour debates in a TV studio with
Larry King and no audience.  This of course only highlighted how afraid
he was to debate the Smart Guy, and people made fun of him
unmercifully.  Finally, the Dumb Guy had to agree to the debates, but he still
insisted on some crazy rules, like no follow-up questions.  And he wouldn't
let the Smart Guy ask him any questions at all.

When the debates finally happened, just as you'd expect, the Smart Guy
whooped the Dumb Guy's ass.  But after the debates all the TV reporters
insisted that the Dumb Guy had won.

Well, the Smart Guy was really confused after that.  He went to his
advisors to learn how to be more like the Dumb Guy -- but he wasn't too
good at being a Dumb Guy, so they decided that he should just try to be
more like himself, a Regular Guy.  He did things like do a 24-hour
campaign marathon, and got so punchy going on about 3am, that he asked a
crowd of about 5,000 people in his home state how many of them were
related to his wife Tipper.  And at another rally an hour later, he
proclaimed that he had about 2,500 cousins in that town.  He even started making
fun of the Dumb Guy.  At one rally, he told the audience what the Dumb
Guy had said about Social Security:  "He said, 'I mean, what do the
Democrats think Social Security is, some kind of Federal Program?'  Then
he nodded his head and said in his best Valley Boy voice:  "Ye-ah!"

The Smart Guy was funny that episode.

The actors who play members of the press are fantastic.  There's this one guy who
plays a TV pundit named Tim Russert, and all he can talk about is the current President's
private parts.  He does an hour show each week, and every week he's got a different
guest on to talk about the President's privates.

Election 2000 went out with a whiz-bang end-of-season cliffhanger:
Who won the election?  You see, the Dumb Guy's brother Jeb, who was also the
governor of Florida, was supposed to have fixed it so the Dumb Guy would win the state,
but even though he prevented a lot of black people from voting, folks found out about it
and there were all kinds of protests and even a couple of riots.

It went on for about two months.  In one raucous episode, a bunch of Jewish
people in Florida thought they had voted for the Smart Guy, but it turned out that
they had actually voted for a Nazi named Pat Buchanan.  The Smart Guy and his
aides tried to use this as proof that the election was faulty and the votes needed to
be recounted, but the Dumb Guy's daddy sent his lawyer James Baker down there,
and he insisted that the Jewish community was actually a Pat Buchanan stronghold.

Things were complicated by the fact that it turns out the Smart guy had
actually won the popular vote by over a half million votes.  Meanwhile,
more and more stories started coming out about boxes of ballots sitting
in the police evidence room in Miami that had never been counted, and
about ballot machines being rigged.

In one of the final episodes of the season, the heat was turned up to a
boil by the Florida Supreme Court, who ruled that the votes must be
recounted.  The Dumb Guy panicked, because he knew that he had actually
lost the election, and in fact, when they started recounting the votes,
the Smart Guy kept gaining on him.  By the time they'd gotten halfway
through, the Smart Guy was behind by only 120 votes.  It became clear
that at the rate things were going, if they counted the rest of the votes
in the state, the Smart Guy would win by about 23,000 votes.

Folks, I'm telling you, these writers know how to create suspense.

How did they get out of it, you ask?  Well, here they truly topped themselves.
In a bizarre turn of events that would never happen in the United States if this
were an actual election, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, stopped the counting
of the votes and awarded the presidency to the Dumb Guy.

In his decision, one of the Justices, a character named Antonin Scalia,
said that counting the votes would do irreparable harm to the Dumb
Guy's candidacy.  This of course meant that if they counted all the votes,
the Dumb Guy would lose, but the Scalia character couched it in some
fancy pants legalese.  It was possibly the funniest episode of the
season.  Of course, it wasn't very realistic.  I mean, that would never
happen in real life.  But itÕs just a TV show, so we can all just sit back
and laugh about it.

They're adding some cast members for season two, and so far it looks
poised to top season one.  (This is not the first time they've added cast
members, by the way.  They've been adding minor characters all along
because throughout season one, the Dumb Guy kept killing people.  He was
killing so many people that the Pope and Pat Robertson asked him please
not to kill this one woman because she was a born-again Christian.  But
of course he just killed her anyway - he's a Dumb Guy.  (How they got
the Pope and Pat Robertson to do cameos we'll never know, but it was one
hell of a nice twist.)

They recently hired this woman to do a three-episode stint as Linda
Chavez, the Dumb Guy's nominee for Labor Secretary, but it turns out that
she actually employed an illegal alien as a maid.  A labor secretary
who hires illegal aliens -- Is that a great twist or what?  If it's one
thing these writers understand, it's irony.

Chavez tried to defend her actions by saying that she didn't "hire" the
woman, that she just was helping her out by paying her for doing some
cleaning around the house.  But of course she wasn't fooling anybody,
and finally had to drop out.

Election 2000 just got picked up for four years under a new title:  the
Bush Administration.  The new season kicks off on January 20th and
focuses on the Dumb Guy's inauguration, which of course he'll mispronounce,
and the protests in the Capital.  We just spotted a preview for the
first episode.  It showed a TV reporter talking about the Inauguration,
and saying that 750,000 people were expected to protest.

Make sure you tune in this Saturday, folks.  You don't want to miss it.
If last season is any indication, this show should be the funniest thing to
hit television since that classic comedy of the 1980s, the Reagan/Bush years.