Dasu Krishnamoorty
On the threshold of death, Saddam Hussein has reason to celebrate the setback to Bush presidency and the exit of Donald Rumsfeld who was the driving force behind the US Iraq war decision. Iraq did both of them in. Democrats have swept Tuesday’s midterm election, wresting the House by a margin that pollsters found too rash to forecast and the Senate by 51-49, according to AP.
How did this happen? The New York Times has an explanation: "There was only one explanation for the crazy-quilt combination of victories around the country that gave the Democrats control of the House of Representatives last night: an angry shout of repudiation of the Bush White House and the abysmal way the Republican majority has run Congress." In the first six years of his aggressive presidency Bush paid scant respect to multilateralism and paid for it. At his press conference, Bush said he would work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way. "I`m confident that we can overcome the temptation to divide this country between red and blue," he said.
Columnists saw it as the most expensive and one of the nastiest midterm elections in American history. A billion dollars went into negative political advertising that dug into the history of the candidates and hearsay about them. Friend of Republicans, the Wall Street Journal was critical of GOP supporters using negative ads to taint Democrats. The Journal also blamed Republicans for abandoning the reform agenda that helped Bush to win twice. Except the economy, Bush has very little to show in his second term. Tuesday’s election was also the most watched in American history with hundreds of observers keeping vigil on the working of the electronic voting machines and managing to phase out long lines at poll precincts. It marked the end of what the Time magazine called the Republican revolution that began in 1994.
Media reaction in Britain to the Republican collapse was mixed. It is not news if the Guardian had hailed the performance of Democrats as a historic turning point. It was also expected of the Daily Telegraph to bemoan that Bush, who had earned political capital in his re-election in 2004, has squandered it and that for the remaining two years of his presidency he would be hamstrung by a hostile Congress. The Economist equated the Democratic sweep as loss of control for Bush over domestic policy—although reform of immigration policy may now be more likely to succeed. But a fully Democratic Congress can confront him with a bill for a hike in the minimum wage that would he would find hard to veto.
There is a lot of speculation over what Democrats would do with their newly acquired political weight. A Democratic capture of both houses would build powerful pressure on President Bush, from his men as well as Democrats, for a fundamental change of direction in the increasingly unpopular Iraq war. If Democrats win big, caustically commented St. Louis Today, liberal elites will be eager to cast the gains as vindication of blue-state sanity over red-state religious radicalism. "They will proclaim a new mandate for everything from fast withdrawal from Iraq to embryonic stem cell research to gay marriage."
The sanest advice to Democrats in their hour of elation came from the Washington Post which reminded them that they had won the House, the Senate (according to AP) too but not because voters had necessarily agreed with their program. Because, the Post asked, "How many voters, we wonder, could name even one of the Democrats` vaunted "Six for `06" legislative proposals? As they prepare to wield power, Democrats don`t have capital from voters; at most, they enjoy a line of credit. The right way to draw on that will be to resist the partisan temptation to act as the other side did, highhandedly and unilaterally."
The New York Times too has a word of caution for Democrats. Its editorial warned that they would have to do far more than run investigations if they were to build on their victory. "The House Democrats will have to shift from the role of tactical opposition to shadow government. They will have to pass bills — bills that might not make it into law, but that would provide a clear idea of what their party would do if it were really in control." And while they are trying to build a new majority, the Democrats need to remember what happens when a party in power loses its way, the Times said.
The USA Today, which predicted that the voters would vote for Democrats to punish Republicans for backing Bush’s commitment to continue the Iraq war, said the Democrats had really no idea of what to do with Iraq. In the event of a victory, Democrats would throw out the Bush strategy and draw a plan to end the war. In his campaign, Bush claimed he had a plan for victory but the NYT/CBS poll showed that few Americans had faith in it.
The Republican debacle raises uncomfortable questions about the strategies the Bush-Rove (Karl) had devised to achieve a durable Republican political majority. They placed, the Los Angeles Times said, their main emphasis on unifying and energizing Republicans and right-leaning independents with an agenda that focused squarely on the goals of the conservatives. Tuesday’s election result, however, repudiated that approach. Today, the President finds himself in a radically changed political atmosphere and will have to work in collaboration with Democrats as he had promised at his press conference.
Media watchers have always been apprehensive of an unchecked Republican majority in both chambers and a Republican occupying the White House at the same time. Their fears were founded on the Republican record of meddling with the age-old checks and balance mechanism that has been the arch stone of American democracy. As the New York Times wrote, the Republicans could not be a threat "as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution." But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits.