Any one section in this book would probably be sufficient fodder for a blog post -- and probably has been. And any one of these posts would be a modest effort at writing, capturing a rather facile thesis: terrorism was a salient issue among voters in the past two elections, and they have perceived the GOP as having the greater ability to combat it. This is enough to sustain a 90-second visit to TKS, but 332 pages of 90-second visits is simply tiresome.

Voting to Kill indeed feels like a collection of blog posts because so much of it comes in lists. Geraghty will present an (uninteresting) observation, like the fact that many on the Left said stupid things in the wake of 9/11, and then beat it to death by citing every quote that the blogosphere and Lexis-Nexis can produce to support it (blockquotes and references to other bloggers abound). This comprises the entirety of Chapters 5 and 6, nearly a third of the book, and continues elsewhere. Geraghty prattles on about Michael Moore, at one point for 18 pages at a stretch, and then has the audacity to follow that some pages later with:

In fact, there is a bizarre phenomenon of extreme attentiveness to lefty comments in righty circles. Conservatives bloggers, in particlar, seem to have this intense interest in what the fringiest of the left fringe is saying about the political news of the day.

This tendency to smother a subject with tedium prevails elsewhere. Chapter 4 is a slapdash overview of U.S. Foreign Policy gaffes from 1968-2001 punctuated by boldfaced summaries that repeat the already brief text. One wonders whether Geraghty was paid by the word. This is also apparent in whole sections that ramble on into pointlessness -- I still don't know what Chapter 10 was about. Or take, for instance, the section "Dems Need a Sense of Our National Mission," which begins with an almost stream-of-consciousness recitation of movie plots. The book winds down like Frank Sinatra scatting, trying to remember the lyrics to a song that's gone on too long.

One would hope that among all this, one would find some flashes of insight into recent electoral politics. There are none. Geraghty does offer some advice for Democrats, some cautions for Republicans, and, surprisingly, some praise for Hillary Clinton, but on the whole, the book seems to be an attempt at the Permanent Record of Common Knowledge. Republicans who get a kick out of this book would be reminiscent of some sports fan whooping it up to tapes of last year's winning season.

This provides for some giddy hubris: Geraghty declares that "The 2008 GOP candidate will gaze upon a panoply of low-hanging fruit, rich in electoral college votes." Further, Kerry's 2004 performance may be the "high watermark" for Democratic presidential candidates. The 31 Red States spell good fortunes for House and Senate races. Most dramatically, Geraghty declares, "There is actually nothing guaranteeing that the Democratic Party will continue to have any influence in U.S. politics."

The only thing tempering these predictions is a short section that worries over whether national security will continue to be a salient issue; this is also accompanied by a section depicting a rather rosy assessment of the GWOT. Herein lies the book's greatest flaw: an almost complete absence of policy analysis, even as Geraghty states, "politics is about policy differences." Nowhere does he raise the very valid concerns that the GOP may lose their perceived edge on national security through bungling the war on terror. And recent polls show that it is no longer just the Left, as Geraghty implies, who view the invasion of Iraq as a separate -- and distracting -- issue.

In the end, we have a book that contains nothing original, insightful, or useful. What we do have is a collection of lists, details, and news clippings -- all of which strikes one as just so much padding, clumsily stapled together. It is a whole that is less than the sum of its parts.