View 543 November 3 - 9, 2008 (original) (raw)
Friday, November 7, 2008
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 +/- 100,000Approximately 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.
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The aftermath continues.
There is considerable discussion on new party building over in mail.
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And NASA says the sun is getting active again. We will see, but that may halt the cooling trend. We can hope. I'd rather have warning than ice.
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A WARNING: Take Heed
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001530.html
Be warned!
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Michael Crichton, RIP
For a good commentary, see http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9305 America loses its moral technologist.
It is always a dilemma when someone I knew dies. I don't like writing obituaries. Memento mori. With Crichton it wouldn't be necessary since he was famous and there would be thousands of announcements; and while I knew him, I knew almost nothing that wouldn't be in the other obituaries.
I didn't know him well. We met long ago in the 1970's when I was president of Science Fiction Writers of America and he was just becoming famous with Andromeda Strain. I got invited to the grand opening of the movie, and met him a couple of other times that year, persuading him to join SFWA. He did so on condition that his address and phone number (this is well before email addresses were common; I had one, and so did he, but people with at signs in their names were rare in those days) were kept secret; he'd had to change his phone number several times after the successful opening of Andromeda Strain. Hollywood is like that. We did talk on the phone a couple of times.
He remained a SFWA member for a couple of years after I left office, but eventually dropped out, and we had contact a couple more times over the years. I never told him that Robert Heinlein wanted me to tell him that Crichton had done wrong by getting a Harvard MD and never practicing medicine. I didn't discuss it much with Robert, either, because I didn't particularly agree. Heinlein's position was that Crichton ought to have got a PhD in medical physiology, so that he hadn't taken up a slot that ought to have gone to someone who wanted to be a practicing physician. Mine was that it wasn't my business. In any event I never told Crichton that.
We spoke a couple of times when I was still active doing science columns. Crichton was intelligent and read more of the science literature than I did, which is pretty hard to do or was in those days. He congratulated me on the stories that appear in EXILE -- AND GLORY and my American Legion Magazine articles on America's Looming Energy Crisis, and we met at a couple of movie openings -- I got invited to those in them there days. He said he really loved Lucifer's Hammer. And that was about it. I can say we were friends but not close.
I did read most of his books. I found his energy conspiracy book entertaining and parts of it excellent. It worked as a story. I declined to get into the fight it generated with Greg Benford.
I didn't know Dr. Crichton had lung cancer. I hadn't spoken to him in years. He will be missed: he was a good writer who understood technology, and that's pretty rare. I'll miss the books he won't be writing now.
