Recipes for Health: Sweet Potato and Apple Kugel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I’ve looked at a number of sweet potato kugel recipes, and experimented with this one a few times until I was satisfied with it. The trick is to bake the kugel long enough so that the sweet potato softens properly without the top drying out and browning too much. I cover the kugel during the first 45 minutes of baking to prevent this. After you uncover it, it’s important to baste the top every 5 to 10 minutes with melted butter.

 

4 eggs

Salt to taste

2 large sweet potatoes (1 3/4 to 2 pounds total), peeled and grated

2 slightly tart apples, like Gala or Braeburn, peeled, cored and grated

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice

1 tablespoon mild honey or agave nectar

3 to 4 tablespoons melted unsalted butter, as needed

 

1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 2-quart baking dish.

2. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs with salt to taste (I suggest about 1/2 teaspoon). Add the grated sweet potatoes and the apples. Pour the lime juice over the grated apples and sweet potatoes, then stir everything together. Combine the honey and 2 tablespoons of the melted butter and stir together, then toss with the sweet potato mixture and combine well.

3. Transfer the mixture to the prepared baking dish. Cover the dish tightly with foil and place in the oven. Bake 45 minutes. Remove the foil and brush the top of the kugel with melted butter. Return to the oven and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes or longer, brushing every 5 minutes with butter. The kugel is ready when the edges are browned, the top is browned in spots and the mixture is set. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.

Yield: 8 servings.

Advance preparation: You can make this a day ahead and reheat in a medium oven.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 187 calories; 7 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 2 grams monounsaturated fat; 104 milligrams cholesterol; 28 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Debt Ceiling Complicates a Tax Shift

WASHINGTON — Come January, should Congress fail to act, the United States will face more than immense tax increases and spending cuts. It will also run out of room to finance its large running deficits.

The Treasury Department expects the country to hit its debt ceiling, a legal limit on the amount the government is allowed to borrow, close to the end of the year. That would give Congress only a matter of weeks to raise the ceiling, now about $16.4 trillion, before sending financial markets into a panic.

Congressional leaders have made clear that the debt ceiling will be part of the intense negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff, with many members unwilling to raise the ceiling without a broader deal. That has raised financial analysts’ worries of a financial market panic over the ceiling in addition to the slow bleed of the tax increases and spending cuts.

Congressional action is required to raise the debt limit. The Treasury can jostle payments for a few months. But expenses will eventually overwhelm revenue, putting the administration in the position of choosing which bills to pay. It might stop paying soldiers, for instance, or sending Social Security payments.

In 2011, Congressional Republicans would not raise the debt ceiling without a broader agreement to cut the country’s deficit and set it on a better fiscal path. The impasse over finding spending cuts and tax increases to do that led to the creation of the spending cuts on Jan. 1, the same time the Bush-era tax cuts were set to expire.

The threat that the country might not pay all its bills caused a slump in financial markets and led in August 2011 to the first downgrade of the nation’s credit rating. It left broader economic scars, too. Many economists contend it hurt economic growth and jobs.

A July report by the Government Accountability Office found that the delay in raising the debt limit increased the country’s borrowing costs by about $1.3 billion in the 2011 fiscal year. “However, this does not account for the multiyear effects on increased costs for Treasury securities that will remain outstanding after fiscal year 2011,” the report noted, adding that the debt-limit fight diverted Treasury’s time and resources from other priorities.

This year, Congress will have time to negotiate a broader debt deal before needing to raise the ceiling, even if negotiations spill into January. But the ceiling will be a card in the complex political game that the White House, Senate Democrats and Congressional Republicans are playing.

Much as Democrats see President Obama’s veto threat over an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest earners as leverage over Republicans, some Republicans see the need to raise the debt ceiling as leverage over the White House, Republican aides said.

Even if the stakes do not get that high, both parties view lifting the debt ceiling as part of the fiscal-cliff negotiations, and they do not expect Congress to raise it outside of a broader deal.

“Resolving the issues surrounding the fiscal cliff, especially the replacement of the sequester, and the next debt limit increase (likely necessary in February) will require that the president get serious about real entitlement reform,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said in a letter to conservatives this week, as printed on The Hill Web site.

That has Democrats warning Republicans not to risk the country’s credit rating and broader financial stability again.

“They tried it before: ‘We’re going to shut down the government. We’re not going to raise the debt limit,’ ” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, told reporters this week. “They want to go through that again? Fine, but we’re not going to be held subject to something that was done as a matter of fact in all previous administrations.”

Economists have warned that the political posturing over the debt ceiling has enormously dangerous economic consequences — even more so than last year, given the threat of huge tax increases and spending cuts hitting households at the same time.

On Wall Street, analysts have tended to use terms like “apocalypse” and “global catastrophe” to describe what might happen should Congress not lift the ceiling.

This week, Fitch, the credit rating agency, threatened a downgrade to the nation’s credit rating if Congress cannot find a timely resolution.

“Failure to reach even a temporary arrangement to prevent the full range of tax increases and spending cuts implied by the fiscal cliff and a repeat of the August 2011 debt ceiling episode would mean that the general election had not resolved the political gridlock in Washington and likely result in a sovereign rating downgrade by Fitch,” analysts at the agency said in a statement on Wednesday.

HSBC analysts this week warned clients of “echoes of 2011” in the uncertainty and market volatility the ceiling might cause.

And economists at the International Monetary Fund cautioned that the unstable situation in the United States might have international ripple effects.

“For now, a lack of political agreement keeps uncertainty about the fiscal road map unresolved,” the fund said in a global risk assessment. “Although bond yields remain low, when contentious political decisions — such as raising the debt ceiling — have come due in the past, uncertainty about the outcome led to unfavorable market reactions.”

But other analysts said they would be surprised if the debate over the ceiling became the debacle it did last year. Many Congressional aides said neither side had any interest in causing market panic for political gain.

“Markets are now starting to become the disciplinarians,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago. “C.E.O.’s are finally stepping up to the plate and saying, ‘Excuse me, we can’t do this.’ And that puts political donations and jobs on the line.”

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President Obama Begins Work on Second Term

Newly re-elected, President Obama moved quickly on Wednesday to open negotiations with Congressional Republican leaders over the main unfinished business of his term — a major deficit-reduction deal to avert a looming fiscal crisis — as he began preparing for a second term that will include significant cabinet changes.

Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Obamas landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. More Photos »

Mr. Obama, while still at home in Chicago at midday, called Speaker John A. Boehner in what was described as a brief and cordial exchange on the need to reach some budget compromise in the lame-duck session of Congress starting next week. Later at the Capitol, Mr. Boehner publicly responded before assembled reporters with his most explicit and conciliatory offer to date on Republicans’ willingness to raise tax revenues, but not top rates, together with a spending cut package.

“Mr. President, this is your moment,” said Mr. Boehner, a day after Congressional Republicans suffered election losses but kept their House majority. “We’re ready to be led — not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans. We want you to lead, not as a liberal or a conservative, but as president of the United States of America.”

His statement came a few hours after Senator Harry Reid, leader of a Democratic Senate majority that made unexpected gains, extended his own olive branch to the opposition. While saying that Democrats would not be pushed around, Mr. Reid, a former boxer, added, “It’s better to dance than to fight.”

Both men’s remarks followed Mr. Obama’s own overture in his victory speech after midnight on Wednesday. “In the coming weeks and months,” he said, “I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit, reforming our tax code, fixing our immigration system, freeing ourselves from foreign oil.”

After his speech, Mr. Obama tried to call both Mr. Boehner and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, but was told they were asleep. The efforts from both sides, after a long and exhausting campaign, suggested the urgency of acting in the few weeks before roughly $700 billion in automatic tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts take effect at year’s end — the “fiscal cliff.” A failure to reach agreement could arrest the economic recovery.

Corporate America and financial markets for months have been dreading the prospect of a partisan impasse. Stocks fell on Wednesday, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index closing down 2.4 percent. The reasons for the drop were unclear, given that stock futures did not drop significantly on Tuesday night as the election results became clear. Analysts cited fears about the economic impact of such big federal spending cuts and tax increases, but also about new economic troubles in Europe.

While Mr. Obama enters the next fray with heightened leverage, both sides agree, the coming negotiations hold big risks for both parties and for the president’s ability to pursue other priorities in a new term, like investments in education and research, and an overhaul of immigration law.

The president flew back to Washington from Chicago late on Wednesday, his post-election relief reflected in a playful race up the steps of Air Force One with his younger daughter, Sasha. At the White House, he prepared to shake up his staff to help him tackle daunting economic and international challenges. He will study lists of candidates for various positions that a senior adviser, Pete Rouse, assembled in recent weeks as Mr. Obama crisscrossed the country campaigning.

The most prominent members of his cabinet will leave soon. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner long ago said they would depart after the first term, and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, previously the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, has signaled that he wants to return to California in the coming year. Also expected to depart is David Plouffe, one of the president’s closest confidants.

Mr. Obama is expected to reshuffle both his inner circle and his economic team as he accommodates the changes. For example, Jacob J. Lew, Mr. Obama’s current White House chief of staff and former budget director, is said to be a prime candidate to become Treasury secretary. For the foreseeable future, the holder of that job is likely to be at the center of budget negotiations, and Mr. Lew has experience in such bargaining dating to his work as a senior adviser to Congressional Democrats 30 years ago in bipartisan talks with President Ronald Reagan.

“They’ve been thinking about this for some time and they’re going to have a lot of positions to fill at the highest levels,” said former Senator Tom Daschle, who has close ties to the White House.

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.

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Siemens to sharpen its game with 6 billion euros of savings

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Rihanna a rock star on Victoria's Secret catwalk

NEW YORK (AP) — Rihanna rocked the lingerie look at Wednesday night's Victoria's Secret fashion show in New York, providing the highlight of the live-music soundtrack and holding her own on the catwalk with some of the world's top models.

And those models even had props, including Adriana Lima's ringmaster wand, Doutzen Kroes' body cage and several pairs of the oversized wings that the retailer has made its signature. It would be a close contest who got the biggest wings: Toni Garrn's giant poppy pair or Miranda Kerr's swan-style feathered pouf. Only Lily Aldridge could boast star-spangled wings that shot out silver sparkles.

Alessandra Ambrosio's orchid-petal wings might have lacked a little grandeur, but she made up for it with a $2.5 million jeweled "floral fantasy bra."

Still, wearing a sheer pink mini that gave glimpses of her bra, Rihanna sang "Fresh Out the Runway" at the end of the corset-and-garter parade and she was the one to grab the audience's biggest applause.

The fashion show has become a pre-holiday season tradition for the retailer. CBS will turn it into a one-hour special, which also had performances from Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars, to be shown on Dec. 4.

This year's event had a slight twist. It started with an announcer noting that Victoria's Secret and CBS had each made a donation to relief efforts for Superstorm Sandy, and a thank you to the National Guard members who are based out of the Lexington Avenue Armory that has for years been home to the show.

Mostly, though, models are encouraged to smile, ham it up and show off the extra time at the gym that most admit to in the weeks beforehand. "It's highly televised, and you take that into consideration," said model Joan Smalls ahead of the show. "This is kind of not the same as other runways. You have to prepare your body: No. 1 is the wings are heavy, and No. 2 is you have to be comfortable with your body because the camera will pick up on it if you're not comfortable and confident."

There's an emphasis on glitz, skin and dramatic production here, not wearable undergarment trends for typical Victoria's Secret shoppers. It was divided into six sections: Circus, complete with acrobats, contortionists and a sword eater; Dangerous Liaisons; Pink Is Us; Silver Screen Angels; Angels in Bloom; and Calendar Girls, which allowed Bruno Mars to serenade a model for each month of the year.

For his first song, "Beauty and the Beat," Bieber, wearing low-slung white pants and a white leather studded vest, sat alone with his guitarist in the mellowest part of the show. For "As Long As You Love Me," however, he brought in backup dancers and interacted with the models while moving around a giant makeshift pinball machine.

"It's like a dream come true," said Bieber on the pink carpet before the show. "I would rather be here than anywhere in the world."

___

AP reporter John Carucci contributed to this report.

___

Samantha Critchell tweets fashion at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Fashion

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Recipes for Health: Cabbage, Onion and Millet Kugel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Light, nutty millet combines beautifully with the sweet, tender cabbage and onions in this kugel. I wouldn’t hesitate to serve this as a main dish.

 

1/2 medium head cabbage (1 1/2 pounds), cored and cut in thin strips

Salt to taste

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1/4 cup chopped fresh dill

Freshly ground pepper

1 cup low-fat cottage cheese

2 eggs

2 cups cooked millet

 

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Oil a 2-quart baking dish. Toss the cabbage with salt to taste and let it sit for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until it begins to soften, about 3 minutes, then add a generous pinch of salt and turn the heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring often, until the onion is soft and beginning to color, about 10 minutes. Add the cabbage, turn the heat to medium, and cook, stirring often, until the cabbage is quite tender and fragrant, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the dill, taste and adjust salt, and add pepper to taste. Transfer to a large bowl.

3. In a food processor fitted with the steel blade, purée the cottage cheese until smooth. Add the eggs and process until the mixture is smooth. Add salt (I suggest about 1/2 teaspoon) and pepper and mix together. Scrape into the bowl with the cabbage. Add the millet and stir everything together. Scrape into the oiled baking dish. Drizzle the remaining oil over the top and place in the oven.

4. Bake for about 40 minutes, until the sides are nicely browned and the top is beginning to color. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature, cut into squares or wedges.

Yield: 6 servings.

Advance preparation: The cooked millet will keep in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 days and freezes well. The kugel will keep for 3 days in the refrigerator. Reheat in a medium oven.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 195 calories; 7 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 4 grams monounsaturated fat; 64 milligrams cholesterol; 23 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 148 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 10 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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DealBook: On Wall Street, Time to Mend Fences With Obama

Del Frisco’s, an expensive steakhouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Boston harbor, was a festive scene on Tuesday evening. The hedge fund billionaires Steven A. Cohen, Paul Singer and Daniel Loeb were among the titans of finance there dining among the gray velvet banquettes before heading several blocks away to what they hoped would be a victory party for their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

The next morning was a cold, sobering one for these executives.

Few industries have made such a one-sided bet as Wall Street did in opposing President Obama and supporting his Republican rival. The top five sources of contributions to Mr. Romney, a former top private equity executive, were big banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Wealthy financiers — led by hedge fund investors — were the biggest group of givers to the main “super PAC” backing Mr. Romney, providing almost $33 million, and gave generously to outside groups in races around the country.

On Wednesday, Mr. Loeb, who had supported Mr. Obama in 2008, was sanguine. “You win some, you lose some,” he said in an interview. “We can all disagree. I have friends and we have spirited discussions. Sure, I am not getting invited to the White House anytime soon, but as citizens of the country we are all friendly.”

Wall Street, however, now has to come to terms with an administration it has vilified. What Washington does next will be critically important for the industry, as regulatory agencies work to put their final stamp on financial regulations and as tax increases and spending cuts are set to take effect in the new year unless a deal to avert them is reached. To not have a friend in the White House at this time is one thing, but to have an enemy is quite another.

“Wall Street is now going to have to figure out how to make this relationship work,” said Glenn Schorr, an analyst who follows the big banks for the investment bank Nomura. “It’s not impossible, but it’s not the starting point they had hoped for.”

Traditionally, the financial industry has tended to support Republican candidates, but, being pragmatic about power, has also donated to Democrats. That script got a rewrite in 2008, when many on Wall Street supported Mr. Obama as an intelligent leader for a country reeling from the financial crisis. Goldman employees were the leading source of campaign donations for Mr. Obama, who reaped far more contributions — roughly $16 million — from Wall Street than did his opponent, John McCain.

The love affair between Wall Street and Mr. Obama soured soon after he took office and championed an overhaul in financial regulations that became the Dodd-Frank Act.

Some financial executives complained that in meetings with the president, they found him disinterested and disengaged, while others on Wall Street never forgave Mr. Obama for calling them “fat cats.”

The disillusionment with the president spawned reams of critical commentary from Wall Street executives.

“So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire,” Mr. Loeb wrote in one letter to his investors.

The rhetoric at times became extreme, like the time Steven A. Schwarzman, co-founder of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, compared a tax proposal to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” (Mr. Schwarzman later apologized for the remark.)

Mr. Loeb was not alone in switching allegiances in the recent presidential race. Hedge fund executives like Leon Cooperman who had supported Mr. Obama in 2008 were big backers of Mr. Romney in 2012. And Wall Street chieftains like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, who have publicly been Democrats in the past, kept a low profile during this election. But their firms’ employees gave money to Mr. Romney in waves.

Starting over with the Obama White House will not be easy. One senior Wall Street lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity said Wall Street “made a bad mistake” in pushing so hard for Mr. Romney. “They are going to pay a price,” he said. “It will soften over time, but there will be a price.”

Mr. Obama is not without supporters on Wall Street. Prominent executives like Hamilton James of Blackstone, and Robert Wolf, a former top banker at UBS, were in Chicago on Tuesday night, celebrating with the president.

“What we learned is the people on Wall Street have one vote just like everyone else,” Mr. Wolf said. Still, while the support Wall Street gave Mr. Romney is undeniable, Mr. Wolf said, “Mr. Obama wants a healthy private sector, and that includes Wall Street.

“If you look at fiscal reform, infrastructure, immigration and education, they are all bipartisan issues and are more aligned than some people make it seem.”

Reshma Saujani, a former hedge fund lawyer who was among Mr. Obama’s top bundlers this year and is planning to run for city office next year, agreed.

“Most people in the financial services sector are social liberals who support gay marriage and believe in a woman’s right to choose, so I think many of them will swing back to Democrats in the future,” she said.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 8, 2012

An earlier version of this article misidentified Reshma Saujani as a male.

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Obama Wins New Term as Electoral Advantage Holds

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Americans voted to give President Obama a second chance to change Washington.

Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday, overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.

In defeating Mitt Romney, the president carried Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, a near sweep of the battleground states, and was holding a narrow advantage in Florida. The path to victory for Mr. Romney narrowed as the night wore along, with Mr. Obama winning at least 303 electoral votes.

A cheer of jubilation sounded at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago when the television networks began projecting him as the winner at 11:20 p.m., even as the ballots were still being counted in many states where voters had waited in line well into the night. The victory was far narrower than his historic election four years ago, but it was no less dramatic.

“Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back,” Mr. Obama told his supporters early Wednesday. “We know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”

Mr. Obama’s re-election extended his place in history, carrying the tenure of the nation’s first black president into a second term. His path followed a pattern that has been an arc to his political career: faltering when he seemed to be at his strongest — the period before his first debate with Mr. Romney — before he redoubled his efforts to lift himself and his supporters to victory.

The evening was not without the drama that has come to mark so many recent elections: For more than 90 minutes after the networks projected Mr. Obama as the winner, Mr. Romney held off calling him to concede. And as the president waited to declare victory in Chicago, Mr. Romney’s aides were prepared to head to the airport, suitcases packed, potentially to contest several close results.

But as it became increasingly clear that no amount of contesting would bring him victory, he called Mr. Obama to concede shortly before 1 a.m.

“I wish all of them well, but particularly the president, the first lady and their daughters,” Mr. Romney told his supporters in Boston. “This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation.”

Hispanics made up an important part of Mr. Obama’s winning coalition, preliminary exit poll data showed. And before the night was through, there were already recriminations from Republican moderates who said Mr. Romney had gone too far during the primaries in his statements against those here illegally, including his promise that his get-tough policies would cause some to “self-deport.”

Mr. Obama, 51, faces governing in a deeply divided country and a partisan-rich capital, where Republicans retained their majority in the House and Democrats kept their control of the Senate. His re-election offers him a second chance that will quickly be tested, given the rapidly escalating fiscal showdown.

For Mr. Obama, the result brings a ratification of his sweeping health care act, which Mr. Romney had vowed to repeal. The law will now continue on course toward nearly full implementation in 2014, promising to change significantly the way medical services are administrated nationwide.

Confident that the economy is finally on a true path toward stability, Mr. Obama and his aides have hinted that he would seek to tackle some of the grand but unrealized promises of his first campaign, including the sort of immigration overhaul that has eluded presidents of both parties for decades.

But he will be venturing back into a Congressional environment similar to that of his first term, with the Senate under the control of Democrats and the House under the control of Republicans, whose leaders have hinted that they will be no less likely to challenge him than they were during the last four years.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting.

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Exclusive - Amazon to win EU e-book pricing tussle with Apple

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Quiet media night explodes suddenly, Rove protests

NEW YORK (AP) — Careful media coverage of a close presidential election Tuesday exploded so suddenly Tuesday that it left the bizarre spectacle of Fox News Channel analyst Karl Rove, a major fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, publicly questioning his network's declaration that President Barack Obama had been re-elected.

ABC News was also frantically trying to repair a power outage that left much of its set inoperable precisely at the time the election was being decided.

For several hours, election coverage resembled the run-up to a Super Bowl, with plenty of talk signifying little. Then NBC News, at 11:12 p.m. ET, was the first to declare Obama had won by virtue of winning the battleground state of Ohio. "He remains president of the United States for a second term," said anchor Brian Williams.

Other networks followed suit, including Fox five minutes later. But Rove, the former top political aide to President George W. Bush whose on-air presence on Fox this campaign raised some eyebrows because of his prominent role supporting Romney, suggested the call was premature.

"We've got to be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the candidates and a quarter of the vote left to count ... I'd be very cautious about intruding in this process," said Rove, a behind-the-scenes player in the wild 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore that took weeks to decide. (Gore was on TV Tuesday, too, as anchor of Current TV's election coverage).

It left Rove's colleagues struggling for words.

"That's awkward," said co-anchor Megyn Kelly. She then went backstage to interview on camera two men who were part of Fox's team in charge of making election calls. They had concluded that based on the precincts where votes were left to be counted, Romney couldn't beat Obama.

Later, Rove tried to make light of the encounter. "This is not a cage match," he said. "This is a light intellectual discussion."

As the evening had progressed for Fox and it became clear that Romney, the clear favorite of most of its audience, would find it hard to win, commentators like Sarah Palin and Peggy Noonan looked stricken.

"This was the referendum that Mitt Romney wanted on Barack Obama," said Huffington Post's Howard Fineman on MSNBC. "And guess what? Barack Obama won the referendum. And that's pretty darned emphatic."

Much of ABC's New York election studio was left powerless for about 20 minutes at the height of Tuesday's coverage. The network didn't inform viewers, and tried to compensate by taking anchors Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos away from their desks, and cutting away to crowd shots at Times Square.

Sawyer's relaxed, folksy delivery in her first presidential election night as anchor drew considerable social media attention. The rock group They Might Be Giants tweeted: "and Diane Sawyer declares tonight's winner is ... chardonnay!"

Sawyer and Stephanopoulos were a new election anchor team for ABC, and Scott Pelley led the CBS coverage. Of the three anchors for the biggest broadcast networks, only NBC's Williams was a returnee from 2008.

But it was a far different media world anyway. 2012 was notable for the vast array of outlets that an interested consumer could command to create their own media experience on multiple screens. Web sites offered deep drill-downs in data and social media hosted raucous conversations.

"If you started a drinking game with the words 'exit poll' in it, please stop now. You will die!" tweeted TV critic Tim Goodman.

Obama's Twitter account tweeted a picture of the president hugging First Lady Michelle Obama, and within 45 minutes it was retweeted more than 300,000 times.

Earlier in the evening, journalists took special care not to rely too heavily on exit polls. Perhaps they remembered how misleading exit polls in 2004 led TV networks astray then or perhaps, in CBS' Bob Schieffer's words, its results this year were too contradictory.

News outlets carefully parsed information and sometimes used the same facts for contradictory conclusions.

Fox News analyst Brit Hume noted an exit poll finding that 42 percent of voters said Superstorm Sandy was an important factor in their vote, suggesting that was a positive for Obama since he was widely considered to have been effective in his response. With the same information, the web site Politico headlined: "Exit Survey: Sandy Not a Factor."

There was a certain amount of vamping time, too. Glenn Beck's online network, The Blaze, had a blackboard straight out of the 1960s as a tote board. Beck killed time on the air by asking for cookie dough ice cream from the on-set food bar.

"Waffle cone, please," Beck said.

When Sawyer asked David Muir for the latest news from the Romney campaign, he reported the family had pasta for dinner and the candidate indulged in his favorite peanut butter and honey sandwich.

The media personality with perhaps the most on the line was Nate Silver of The New York Times, whose FiveThirtyEight blog was sought out by 20 percent of the people who visited the newspaper's website on Monday. He has used statistical data throughout the campaign to predict an Obama victory and by Tuesday, had forecast a 90.9 percent chance that Obama would win.

After Obama's victory became clear, Gavin Purcell, producer of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," tweeted that "Nate Silver is the only white male winning tonight." CNN's Piers Morgan tweeted Silver an invitation to appear on his show Wednesday.

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Television Writers Frazier Moore in New York and Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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