March 04, 2008 - For TV, It's Super-Super-Duper Tuesday

No matter what happens this evening - whether Hillary Clinton sweeps Texas and Ohio, whether Barack Obama denies her that bragging right and momentum shift, and whether simple victory has anything to do with the number of delegates won - it's a night to watch politics on TV.

I've outlined tomorrow's evening entertainment options in BEST BETS, but Super-Super-Duper Tuesday is a night to check in all over the dial... and to hop around, time-shift or multitask like a fiercely fickle viewer.

Try this on for size:

During the dinner hour in the East, sample all three bradcast network evening newscasts, just for fun, and take their temperatures. They won't make predictions, but they'll throw a few hints - and, as they've proven already in this election process, they can be very wrong. That's part of the fun.

Next, see how The Jim Lehrer NewsHour covers things on PBS, while popping over to the folks at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC to see how the political wonks there are painting the picture of Texas and Ohio, whose results now become a crucial part of deciding the Democratic nominee for president.

Once prime time begins, you have the polar political opposites, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, butting heads, and CNN doing its roundtable, high-tech thing. Broadcast networks will start doing newsbreaks, and ABC will devote Nightline to whatever happened - but not before Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart weighs in.

It's worth reflecting that this is an awful lot of TV devoted to the same, important subject - and we should be happy about that.

It's also worth reflecting that if representatives of the state of Florida, in their sub-baked wisdom, had not moved their primary earlier in the season to make more of a political impact (thus sacrificing its delegates this year in the process, supposedly), Florida would be a huge part of this Obama-Clinton endgame. Florida's primaries, in recent elections, used to be held the second week of March.

Had Florida stayed put, it could have decided the whole ball of wax. Good move, Sunshine State...