Early election thoughts....

On election night eight years ago, Tim Russert’s dry-erase board on NBC became a potent symbol -- of the ever-changing nature of results that night, and a journalist’s thrill over covering an unfolding story. (Dan Rather’s metaphors did the same, more surreally.)

It was tempting, last night, to wax nostalgic for those days. On TV, election 2008 was a night of uncomfortable restraint. Clearly, many broadcasters, well-steeped in national polling data, were eager to talk early about the implications -- good or bad -- of a decisive Obama victory. But the lessons of 2000 linger on. And so the networks, now decidedly cautious about calling states, replaced giddy projections with a technical gizmo arms race.

CNN had its touch-screen electoral map, so symbolic of high-tech wizardry and granular detail that it was recently spoofed on “Saturday Night Live.” And there was more: the holographic images of reporters at local events; a stream of odd-shaped graphics that were meant to elucidate exit poll data, but wound up inducing headaches. (“This looks like a double funnel,” Soledad O’Brien said at one point to Bill Schneider, looking at one graphic and sounding confused.)

Fox News Channel, meanwhile, presented a graphic screen it called “The Launch Pad” -- anchor Brit Hume teased its operator, Megyn Kelly, that “that confirms it. You're very, very important.” NBC had a ”virtual reality electoral map studio,” in which some graphics rose from a replica of the presidential seal on the floor. On ABC, Charlie Gibson introduced one results map as “one of the great tools that we have here.”

In many ways, the dry-erase board still seemed superior. For one, it was hard to watch many of these networks casually: the killer details were was in the fine print. CNN, for instance, posted running vote tallies for each state in huge numbers. But if you looked closely, you could often see that only 1 percent of results were in.

And all of that information often had little effect on speed -- if speed remains an election-night value for anyone. Despite its avalanche of data, or possibly because of it, CNN was the slowest of the cable networks to call states. Campbell Brown kept preaching caution as if hewing to a yoga mantra.

MSNBC was giddier; it was the first of the cable networks to call Pennsylvania in Barack Obama's column. And well before polls closed, anchor Keith Olbermann was declaring that journalists in 2100 would be interviewing elderly 2008 voters about their votes cast for the first black president.

And though Fox was slower to call results, its panelists telegraphed predictions early on. Even before the network called Pennsylvania, Fox's conservative Bill Kristol looked disconsolate. “This is going to be a bad night for Republicans, I think,” he said.

Across the dial, in the early hours, Republicans acted defeated, and often deflated.On ABC, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani looked subdued, even as he insisted that any McCain running mate would have earned Sarah Palin-style scrutiny. Diane Sawyer sounded apologetic when she pointed out that, nationwide, exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters thought Palin wasn’t qualified to be president. And Charlie Gibson seemed determined to cheer Giuliani up: “I have never seen such a bright Republican tie as you have,” he offered.

But as the bad news for the GOP wore on, even CNN started waxing poetic about the worldwide implications of an Obama victory. When Jeffrey Toobin suggested that there was no historic precedent for the way the nation's image would change overnight, one of his fellow panelists calmly pointed out that the end of World War II might count.