Campaign junkies move on
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Shaleen Aghi is thankful these days for Sarah Palin.
The postelection tidbits she is reading about the former Republican vice presidential candidate - "how she threw tantrums and she cried in the morning" - delay the day when Aghi suffers the withdrawal pangs she knows are coming. Aghi, a 25-year-old tax consultant from Cambridge, spent the campaign turning on CNN's "American Morning" when she woke and ending her night with Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show." Thanks to
Now the long campaign has come to an end and, with it, the occasion for many hours spent watching news channels, trolling websites that track polls, and reading blogs, newspapers, and magazines about an election cycle as intense as it was historic. What now for Aghi and voters like her?
The Onion's website poses the same question in a satirical video that features shellshocked supporters of Barack Obama unsure about how to proceed with their lives. Slate.com advises the campaign-obsessed to use their newly freed time to follow the financial crisis or play the computer game World of Goo.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," Aghi said. "I'm going to have to get a new hobby."
The Sunday before the election, the Rev. Gregory Groover confessed to his congregation at the Charles Street AME Church in Roxbury. I'm a CNN addict, he admitted, and among the parishioners chuckling in the pews he noticed a trustee nodding and pointing to herself.
Throughout the campaign, Groover, 47, who is also vice chairman of the Boston School Committee, turned on CNN when he rose at 5 a.m., and again when he returned home from work in the evening until late at night. He has followed presidential campaigns since he was 11, and his mother mailed him daily clippings about the Nixon-McGovern campaign for him to read at sleepaway camp. As minister of a predominantly black congregation, he followed this campaign more intensely than usual.
"We're called to preach to people that each of us has been blessed with a divine potential to reach and attain the impossibility" he said. "Here's someone who in front of the world was embodying that."
Groover's interest proved contagious. "The family room became CNN central," said his 18-year-old daughter, Gerami, who sometimes flipped on CNN if she awoke in the middle of the night. "Especially it being my first time voting, I felt it was my responsibility to be alert to what's going on." The effects could well be lasting. Before the campaign, reruns of "The Cosby Show" topped her list of TV favorites. "Through this whole process," she said, "CNN became my favorite channel."
For the elder Groover, the future promises more of the same.
"Realistically speaking, it's not going to stop for me. I'm going to watch the developments as Obama appoints his Cabinet and his staff and puts together an administration," he said. "Just all the way up to Jan. 20 and his inauguration. For me, the election is just the beginning."
For David Smith, 64, a high school English teacher who checked political websites several times a day, the Internet eclipsed the two newspapers delivered daily to his Milton doorstep. "I guess I'm addicted to a steadier flow of information than newspapers can provide," he said.
The Onion needn't worry about Smith's return to postcampaign reality. "I'm not about to go comatose because I can't follow the election every five minutes," he said.
Susan Silberberg-Robinson of Brookline, 44, a lecturer in urban design at MIT, kept a timer on her desk so she would limit her Internet searches for political information to 40 minutes. "It's like a wedding the day after," she said. "You're very happy, but there's also this feeling of exhaustion that this long-planned event is over and you need to move on."
