by Tom Gogola - November 4, 2004
You had to be there: Garofalo, Dean and Affleck party like rock stars on election night.
In what is being called the most stunning election-day upset in American history, Howard Dean was elected president yesterday by a margin of 274 to 264 electoral votes.
President George W. Bush and his campaign strategists immediately called the results into question, and vowed a fight. Karl Rove was so unhinged by the defeat, he strangled a jackalope to death at the Bush compound in Crawford. "We won the popular vote!," the doughy political guru screamed at CNN's Wolf Blitzer, as Donald Rumsfeld attempted to subdue him with a hammerlock move. "That's not how democracy is supposed to work! Goddamned electoral college traitors! We'll see you in court! The Supreme Court."
Even with a promised legal tussle ahead of them, it was a night of celebration for Dean and his supporters. As Nevada pushed the electoral-vote tally in Dean's favor at 11:47pm EST, a moment indicated by a panicked furrowing of Dan Rather's brow, the scene at the former Vermont governor's campaign headquarters in Burlington could not have been more orgiastic had Bacchus himself been onstage singing "It's Getting Hot In Here," instead of a shirtless Al Gore. Carol Moseley Braun, bombed on Cristal, was spotted french-kissing Bill Bradley, then disappearing into a smoke-filled room with him. Campaign guru Joe Trippi swaggered around in a leather g-string, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels as two Smith girls smeared his chest with VapoRub and implored him to "drop E with us, baby." Muslim-American women ululated with abandon, though they did not partake of the liquor. The President-elect's wife, Dr. Judy Steinberg Dean, passed around nitrous masks to dozens of giggling Deaniacs, many of them stripped down to nothing but their sports bras and J. Crew skivvies (some wore rep ties). A fully nude Ben Affleck was doing push-ups in the middle of the dance floor as dozens of Homosexual Redneck Prairie-Dog Killers--a key Dean constituency--clapped with joy. Janeane Garofalo swung from a chandelier clad in naught but a bowtie--stolen, she bragged, from Tucker Carlson.
Above the ruckus, President-elect Dean, decked out in his now-trademark a-shirt, took to the stage, wiped a bit of festive vomit from his chin, and--keeping with his campaign pledge to "always support states' rights, even when it's Texas"--slurred happily: "We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York, and we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington D.C.!"
It was pandemonium, utter pandemonium. When the last bottle of bubbly had been swigged many, many hours later, the only question that remained was: How did Howard Dean do it? Oh, and: Did Ted Kennedy really drop 'shrooms with Moby?
Dean ascends to the presidency after an excruciatingly bitter campaign season that had all the subtlety and sophistication of the Second Battle of Ypres.
[rest at: <http://newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:88219>]