Post-Mortem on the Election (Part 1)

Beginning a series of essays on what went wrong with the election. How the greatest country on earth ended up with a smooth-talking, terrorist-loving, racist and socialist.

McCain was a terrible choice for nominee. He advocated policies that were absolutely unacceptable to the vast majority of Republicans, such as the proposed amnesty for illegal aliens. And yet, somehow he managed to win the nomination. Both Thompson and Giuliani would have been better choices but both of them ran ineffective campaigns that were knocked out quite early in the primary season.

As I have said before, it is ridiculous that we continue to allow the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire to choose the nominee for the entire country. The primary schedule should be changed so that everyone votes at the same time, or the order of voting should be rotated. Given the fact that both Iowa and New Hampshire went for 0bama in the general election, a good argument could be made for putting them LAST, not first.

Apparently what happened in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries was many Democrats and Independents crossed over to vote for McCain. This practice should be prohibited and only registered Republicans should be allowed to vote in the primaries and caucuses. This will help us avoid the ludicrous situation we had this year of having a nominee that many Republicans did not care to support.

The notion that Sarah Palin was in any way responsible for the defeat of the Republican ticket is absolutely false. I am certain that almost anyone who had problems with her being VP would have voted for 0bama in any event, no matter who McCain had picked for running mate. Sarah was the only one who gave McCain a chance to win the election. Had he picked someone else, it would have been a landslide similar to 1984 or 1972. I will talk more about Sarah in a subsequent post.

In spite of all the blather about an "historically high turnout" the combined popular vote for 0bama and McCain was 122.6 million, only slightly higher than the combined vote for Bush and Kerry in 2004 of 121.1 million. McCain's problem was that he only got 57.3 million votes as compared with Bush who got 62.0 million in 2004. Of this 4.7 million decrease, how many switched their votes from Republican to Democrat as compared with how many former Republican voters simply stayed home? Good question. If McCain had not picked Sarah, I likely would have not bothered to vote either.

Step #1 to future victories in presidential elections: Nominate someone who will be strongly supported by most Republicans.