Dr Pournelle nails it again

BY Dr. J Pournelle from Chaos Manor

PS 2004 election:

Bush 62,040,610 50.7%
Kerry 59,028,444 48.3%
Total Bush + Kerry 121,069,054
Estimated total voting 122,291,974 +/- 100,000

Approximately 600,000 additional votes cast in 2008. About 4 million more people; how many more eligible voters I am not sure..

Friday. We can hope. It is interesting that Obama has appointed an IDF veteran, a very pro-Israel Congressman, as White House Chief of Staff, which is the chairman of the Privy Council and a very important official. This is not going to go over well with those who rejoice in Obama's middle name. The position is very powerful.

And in fact we know nothing of what Obama will actually do; we have guesses. We do know that Jimmy Carter called many of his fellow Democrats rapacious wolves -- and it is not likely that things will have changed much. As I said, I can almost feel sorry for him.

The remarkable thing is that given the unpopular war, a President who does not project himself well and isn't charismatic at all, and the total economic collapse: given all that, the election was remarkably close. It will be interesting to look at the actual turnout figures broken down by party, race, sex, social class. I would be astonished if this election was an exception to the rule that had the Republicans turned out more of their voters, they could have won; and certainly could have mitigated the disaster. There is no organization; in part because the Country Club Republicans have only contempt for worker bees and hard party workers.

That will change if Newt takes over the Republican National Committee.

I would also like to see an analysis of the vote on a Congressional District basis. I note that Dana Rohrabacher, who is not a "Big Government Conservative" whatever that means, was able to survive a well financed challenge.

Libby Dole, once considered Presidential material, could not hold her Senate seat. That too is interesting. Dole was the only man Clinton could beat in 1996, and he was told that, but he insisted that it was his turn to run and he ran.

Rebuilding a conservative based party will be difficult. Infiltrating the Democrats might be easier -- there were Conservative Democrats for a long time.

Most of the politics I learned was based on having a precinct organization. Obama seems to have built one. The Country Club Republicans apparently thought they didn't need one; but in fact a good precinct organization would have won the election, even so. Of course if the Country Club Republicans had listened to people at the precinct level they would not have got us into this mess.

The Republicans did not deserve to win. I do hope that the nation doesn't have to pay too high a price for turning the rascals out. I fear we have dismissed King Stork for King Heron with a posse of pelicans.

Enough rambling. It's late and I need to get to bed.