We have three important questions to answer: 1) What happened? 2) Why did it happen? 3) What do we do now?
1) What happened?
The Republican Party in general and George W. Bush in particular sustained a stinging rebuke from the American electorate. The Republicans lost control of the house and of the Senate. The agenda moves to the Democrats. The power of the purse moves to the Democrats. The power of the subpoena moves to the Democrats. The power to impeach moves to the Democrats. The power to affect foreign policy by, for example, defunding the war moves to the Democrats. The power to appoint conservative judges has been greatly compromised as has been the power to confirm appointments such as ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of Defense.
The Republican Party has ruptured the bond that held it to the majority of the people of the United States since 1994. When the polls say that the people trust the Democrats more than Republicans on taxes, it means, as Newt Gingrich has said, they fired us because they don't trust us. It is as simple as that, the party has lost the trust of the people.
The Democrats have ideally positioned themselves to strike for the presidency in 08. It has extended its governorships, Senate seats and control, House seats and control, and other levers of power. The Democrats have enhanced their ability to raise campaign funds and compromised the Republicans' ability to do so. Perhaps worse, the Democrats have turned the tables on the Republicans. It is Republicans now who are without a platform, without an identifying philosophy and without an articulate spokesman to advance their cause.
The Democrat party is extending its tentacles into the red states and the Republican Party is in grave danger of becoming a sectional party with an ever declining census and a bunker mentality.
2) Why did it happen?
America has repudiated the war in Iraq.
The American people have spoken respecting the war in Iraq: they do not tolerate the war in which they see no plan for victory but where they do see blood and treasure being spilled to no purpose with no end in sight.
The repudiation of the Republican mandate is broad although perhaps not equally deep and evidently focused on three issues: (1) the war in Iraq. (2) corruption, the so-called, "culture of corruption" (Abramoff, Cunningham, Ney, Foley) and which Republicans like us probably think of in terms of spending. (3) incompetence. (Katrina, Iraq) Of the three, Iraq was obviously the dominant factor.
In fact, growing restiveness with the war in Iraq, predictable at least since the Bush reelection by such a narrow margin in Ohio in 04, is the overwhelming reason for the Republican debacle. The Democrats nationalized the election by converting it into a referendum on the war. In the process they managed successfully to demonize George Bush as an incompetent bumbler. They defeated candidates by morphing them into George Bush.
The essential reason for the defeat was that it was anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush.
85 percent of Americans said the “major reason” was disapproval of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, 71 percent said disapproval of Bush’s overall job performance, 67 percent cited dissatisfaction with how Republicans have handled government spending and the deficit, 63 percent said disapproval of the overall performance of Republicans in Congress, 61 percent said Democrats’ ideas and proposals for changing course in Iraq. Tellingly, just 27 percent said a major reason the Democrats won was because they had better candidates. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15667442/site/newsweek/
There are many subordinate reasons why this calamity happened and it is necessary to identify them and assign weight to them so that the important ones can be addressed and corrected.
One such reason can be addressed and could have been corrected, or at least mitigated: It is quite normal for a political party in the sixth year of the presidency to lose the Senate and House seats. In some respects, it was to be expected that this would occur now. Clinton, however, was able to resist this historical trend but those were rather special circumstances.
Similarly, history shows the political parties, after 12 years in power, tend to become arrogant, cynical, and corrupt and that certainly has happened to the Republicans in spades. The voters have just cured the arrogance dimension of this equation but it remains to be seen if the corruption has been rooted out. The "values voters" will tell us in the next election if the Republicans have abandoned their cynicism.
Other reasons are less easily identifiable and more subjective in nature. One goes to the very essence of the character of George Bush. I've long published that he is not a movement conservative, in fact he is not a conservative at all but rather he is a patrician with loyalties to family, friends, and country. His politics are animated not by conservative ideology but by a noblisse oblige which, as a substitute for political philosophy, move him to act from loyalty and love of country. The result of this is that he does not weigh his words and actions against a coherent standard grounded in conservatism, but instinctively reacts to do what is right for family, friends, and country. Thus we get Harriet Meirs, pandering to the Clintons and Kennedys, prescription drug laws, campaign finance laws, runaway spending, and the war in Iraq. The conservative movement is left muddled and confused and the Republican Party undisciplined and leaderless. In these circumstances all manner of mischief is possible beginning with corruption and indiscipline in the ranks. To be effective, a president must be feared as well is loved. A President is more than just Commander in Chief and Chief Executive of the nation, he is the titular head of his party and he must rule it. If Bush was willing to pander to the likes of Teddy Kennedy, what did Senator John McCain have to fear from him? Bush has utterly failed in his role as head wrangler of the Republican Party.
Other subjective reasons for the debacle involve Bush's personal character. He is essentially a nonconfrontational man who would rather operate through collegiality than through power. This is reinforced by his Christian belief and he will almost literally turn the other cheek. So, his loyalty to family and friends affects his appointments and produce mediocrities like Brown at FEMA and Ridge at Homeland Security and Harriet Meirs. It makes him shrink from prosecuting the crimes of his enemies even to the point of overlooking real security lapses committed by The New York Times. It makes it very difficult for Bush to discipline his troops and fire incompetent or disloyal subordinates. Instead he soothes them with the Medal of Freedom.
George Bush is a singularly inarticulate man. When he is not delivering a prepared speech, his sincerity and goodness of character come through, but his policies often die an agonizing death along with the syntax. The truth is that Bush has never been able, Ronald Reagan style, to articulate well the three or four fundamental issues which move the times in which we live. One need only cite the bootless efforts to reform Social Security as an example. His inability to tell America why we must fight in Iraq to win the greater worldwide war against terrorism, or how we are even going to win in Iraq, has been fatal to the Republicans' chances in this election. Of course, one can carry this Billy Budd characterization too far and it is easy to overemphasize its importance, but it is part of the general pattern which has led us to this pass. It is a very great pity that the bully pulpit has been squandered in the hands of a man so inarticulate. That the bully pulpit was wasted means that there are no great guiding principles for the country, for the party, for the administration, for Congress to follow, or for the voters to be inspired by. If the voters went into the booth confused about what the Republican Party stands for, the fault is primarily George Bush's.
There are structural problems for the Republicans as well. By the demographic breakdown of the Northeast and the ambitions of senators such as McCain, there was no coherent Republican policy in the Senate. It is in the nature of the Senate that wayward senators are difficult to bring to heel in any circumstance and Bush's inability properly to act as party leader has given Mavericks a green light to commit terrible damage to the Republicans' electoral posture. This demographic trend is destined to get worse and the self survival instincts of what is left of the Republican Party outside of the South will only become more acute and lead to more defections. Other senators, even when not motivated by personal ambition or demographic problems in blue states, felt free to engage in an extravaganza of corrupt spending to benefit their districts and soothe their contributors. There is a regrettable tendency to underemphasize the demographic handicap under which we conservatives struggle. Here is what I posted, before the election:
Perhaps now is not the time but certainly after Santorum is defeated we conservatives must face the reality that the electoral map is shrinking. We are unable to make inroads into the blue states (these New Jersey an anomaly due to parochial corruption) while we remain vulnerable and virtually all of the border states, Tennessee, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland (actually a lost cause). Now even the Old Dominion is threatened. Ohio may be as difficult as Pennsylvania after this cycle.
Demographics will soon turn Florida and Texas away from us and, with the loss of either one of them, conservatism has no hope of putting a president in the White House
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1724335/posts?page=17#17
Bush failed to provide leadership on spending. Merely cutting taxes is only one leg of the stool, fiscal discipline must be maintained. Failing to impose party discipline is a grave sin, but Bush magnified it exponentially with the mindless prescription drug entitlement, farm supports, and educational spending. If Bush can have his prescription drug program that nobody wanted, why cannot Senator Stevens in Alaska have his bridge that nobody needed? Bush not only failed to set the proper example in fiscal discipline, he affirmatively set the wrong example of profligacy.
Press bias, says you?. One need only cite the unrelenting hostility of the Washington Post against Senator Allen to demonstrate Republican difficulties in this area. Allen's real opponent was the Washington Post. But this is not new, the Washington Post did the same thing to Ollie North several cycles ago and will do so again whenever it gets the chance. Republicans have been able to overcome this handicap in recent elections, so long as they had an effective affirmative story to tell. In fairness to the Republicans, it is true to say that the hostility of the press has reached even more egregious dimensions as a result of the war in Iraq. The remedy for this is to get a policy and tell your story well. In short, set the agenda, one which the public hears and understands in spite of the media. The classic example of this is Newt Gingrich's brilliant contract with America in 1994 in which he stole the entire agenda right out from under the noses of the drive-by media. I think their visceral hatred of Gingrich has as much to do with this coup as it does with the actual right wing policies contained in the contract with America. If one is not willing to accept the world as it is with all of its media bias then one is ultimately confounded. If one cannot move until press bias is corrected, then one cannot move on until the bias in academia or in immigrant groups is eliminated. The scale will never be balanced and conservatism, too anguished to move, will never find another majority.
While some exit polls say that only 7% of voters regarded immigration as the important issue, I am personally convinced that the percentage is much higher among conservatives and, anyway, the implications for the Republican Party and the conservative cause of unchecked illegal immigration is nothing short of catastrophic. Bush bashing or not, the cold reality is that George Bush has willfully and deliberately failed to to enforce the nation's laws on immigration. Bush has simply got a blind spot here, he wants amnesty and, by God, now he is going to get it because the Democrats are going to give it to him. The only hope for sanity in controlling immigration has died with Republican control of the House. Bush's duty was to enforce existing law against employers who seek unfair competitive advantage by hiring illegals at substandard wages. Now we have upwards of 30 million illegals in America and there is no conservative branch of government that can stop these people getting the vote eventually and, believe me, they will not vote conservative in my lifetime. Bush's stealth legacy to the Republican Party will become apparent as he exits the White House and Republicans remain in minority status for as long as the eye can see. Bush's dereliction in this regard justifies every conservative in turning his face from Bush and many did on election Day.
Lest this become a Bush bashing fest, let us note that Congressmen and Senators are for the most part alpha males (and sometimes bitchy females) who quite rightly should be expected to do the right thing without the fear and admonition of the President. But they did not. The single most appropriate word which identifies the Republican Congress before the election is, "arrogance" - although "greed" must run a very close second. Winston Churchill once said of the Socialist Clement Atley, "he is a very modest man, and he has much to be modest about." Running the gamut from sordid affiliations with K street lobbyists and the Abramoffs of the world, to unseemly earmarks, and continuing all the way to outright venality, the Republicans have much to be more than modest about. The voters have just dealt them their comeuppance and it is long overdue. But elections are blunt instruments for weeding out corruption; the voters wrath, like God's rain, falls on the just and the unjust alike. So honest and incorrupt conservative representatives of the people like Rick Santorum fall with the Cunninghams and the Neys and the Foleys while Democrat Menendez enjoys a pass. While it does not discriminate among Republicans, the voters wrath does discriminate between parties and so their wrath fell disproportionately on Republicans because they are the party in power. This also has been remedied by this election. Finally, in a strange way the voters grim unhappiness with the course of the war in Iraq finds expression in this general repugnance of the corruption and venality and directs it almost exclusively against the Republicans, because they are the party associated with the war. It is human nature to react to an irritant disproportionately when the soul is troubled by larger problems. This identification as the party solely responsible for the war is something the Republicans must remedy in the next two years.
All of these factors so far cited are in themselves not party breakers and could have been managed and mitigated but for the elephant in the room: The war in Iraq. Indeed, the superficially inconsistent results of this election cannot be understood unless one accepts the centrality of the issue of the war in Iraq. It was the fulcrum upon which all else turned. Why did the voters overlook the corruption of Democrats and punish disproportionately Republicans? The war in Iraq. Why did the electorate conclude that the administration has been incompetent in handling hurricane Katrina while resolutely declining to consider other explanations? The war in Iraq. The Democrats and the media contrived to make Katrina a metaphor for Iraq and the people largely bought it because they were uneasy about Iraq but patriotic enough to want victory. So they could resolve their ambivalence by reacting to Katrina. The same analysis applies to the issue of the culture of corruption. Why were conservative issues respectfully treated by the electorate when it came to referenda? Because they were not tainted by the war in Iraq. Why was Lincoln Chafee turned out in Rhode Island even though he was adamantly against the war in Iraq? Because his identification as a member of the party responsible for the war overcame his individual posture. The rabidly antiwar voters in Rhode Island knew that Chafee would be casting his votes for control of the Senate with the Republican war party. Why was Senator Lieberman returned in Connecticut as independent despite his support for the war? I have no explanation except to say this anomaly can be explained in terms of Republican defection into his camp and the extraordinarily high personal appeal and integrity of a man who only two cycles ago was his party's vice presidential nominee. Besides, Lieberman made it clear that he would cast his votes for Senate control with the Democrats-the antiwar party in this election. Why do polls show that the administration and the party have lost the confidence of the people in conducting the overall war against terror? Because the people have concluded that the war in Iraq has been conducted incompetently. Katrina or Iraq, chicken or the egg, it all feeds upon itself.
When an uneasy independent voter drew the curtain in the booth he had to choose, statistically speaking, between a Democrat and a Republican. Uneasy about the war, this voter could resolve this dilemma by rationalizing his choice for the Democrats on other grounds like corruption, or incompetence. When a thinking conservative entered the booth, or more likely considers whether to travel to the polling place at all, he could resolve his logical dilemma by staying home where he would not have to choose between his party and his logic because he could justify that decision out of anger over spending and immigration. This conservative voter is like the man who comes home unexpectedly from a business trip, goes upstairs, enters the bedroom where he finds his wife naked in bed, opens the closet door and finds a naked man there with an erection, and hears his wife say, "who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" Well, the conservative voter, deeply troubled by what he sees concerning the war in Iraq, can avoid the dilemma by not opening the closet door, by not going to the polling place.
3) What do we do now?
The first steps have already been taken with the firing of Rumsfeld. I never thought I would hear myself say that Rumsfeld, a heroic figure to me, had to go, but go he must. Rumsfeld has to take the fall for us so that Bush can go on governing the country for the next two years. There is another dimension to this, in a purely political sense the Republicans must get their own fingerprints off the Iraq war and affix the Democrat's fingerprints on to it. Rumsfeld's departure is the first step in that process. In this move Bush has said to the American people, "I get it, we must change course in Iraq, and I'm going to do it now here is the down payment." With this single stroke much of the exasperation and venom which motivated the electorate will leach away. Moreover, with this stroke he has put the ball in the ‘rats' court and given them a hard choice: either they can obstruct the nomination and leave themselves open to the charge that that's all they are, obstructionists, or they can support the nomination and own part of the responsibility for the conduct of the war under this new Secretary of Defense. Likewise, Bush was right to advance the nomination of Bolton to the United Nations. Here again the Democrats risk the charge of being obstructionist against the man who, in truth, has performed well during his interim appointment.
The president must move the ball and force the Democrats to choose because every time they choose they will lose a portion of the electorate who put them in office. In politics one is either on defense or offense but the only ball carrier we have right now is George Bush. He must learn to take the game to the Democrats. I fear that he will not be up to the task at the level demonstrated by Bill Clinton under similar circumstances in 1995.
Let us consider how the Rumsfeld resignation was stage managed as an example of everything that's been wrong with the public face of the Bush administration. First, why in the world was the resignation not done before the election? Who knows how many seats it might have saved. Second, why did Bush expose himself extemporaneously to the country in a setting which plays to his weakness? Predictably, he fell into the media's trap and made a tremendous gaffe to the effect that he lied to the American people about Rumsfeld's impending removal before the election. These kinds of gaffes are the inevitable consequence of playing defense. Tony Snow should be handling these inquiries. George Bush should be reading prepared text. Third, why did not Bush inveigle Speaker Pillosi and majority leader Reed (how I hate writing those words) into expressing approval or even disapproval of his replacement? Had they disapproved, all their talk of bipartisan cooperation would have been exposed on the very first day. If they had approved, Bush gets the credit for a bi-partisan choice. So, the stage management of this affair was mangled but the overall and long-term effect will have its purpose.
The truth is the Republicans now face an agonizing decision which will reveal whether they are entitled to rule or not, they must change course in Iraq,- that has already been decided by the election. It has been virtually acknowledged by Bush in so many words. It has been acknowledged by deed (the firing of Rumsfeld,). The Republicans task must be to implicate the Democrats in the change of course of the war from here on out, but the Republicans must also choose for the country and not for the party. Ideally they can find a solution to the dilemma in Iraq which is also beneficial to the party, but that is by no means assured. We must take a page from Slick Willie's book when he looked into the camera and lied, "the era of big government is over." Clinton then successfully blunted the Gingrich revolution with a series of small triangulations which put him on offense while pretending to have learned his electoral lesson about big government. We must be supple but, we are Republicans -- even conservatives after all, and we are dealing with the actual survival of the Republlic, not school uniforms, so we must do what is right. I think President Bush has to look into the camera and say to the American people:
We are changing course in Iraq. Your sons will not die in vain to establish a democracy which the Iraqi people despise. We give the Iraqi government fair notice, either you provide the constitutional government which your people have risked their lives to vote for, or you descend without America into the chaos which your greed, tribalism, and religious fanaticism otherwise make inevitable. America now recognizes that it must husband its martial resources and deploy them judiciously. We will use our intelligence, our special ops, and our air power to contain any spill over of strife beyond Iraq’s borders and to destroy terrorists and those who succor them and those who covet WMDs inside Iraq. We will bomb our enemies, whether Sunni, Shi'ite, or even Kurd, and supply arms, intelligence, and air power to our friends, so long as they remain our friends.
Our Army is very good at destroying regimes which harbor terrorists or build weapons of mass destruction but it is not equally good at occupying territory against asymmetrical resistance at a cost in lives and treasure which the American people are willing to pay. So I serve a fair warning on rogue nations who wish to flirt with terrorism, we will use the military might of the United States of America to effect regime change without undertaking responsibility for the consequences. America's guiding star in the war against terrorism is the survival of our nation state. Against this transcendent imperative of national survival, we will brook no interference.
In thus abandoning the hope of nation building and the nurturing of democracy, Bush reverts to his pre-9/11 instincts and to the true course of conservative philosophy. As ruthless as this policy might sound, it is the only way that America can hope to ultimately win the war against Islalmic jihad before our cities are nuked. Most important, it satisfies the mandate of the electorate to end the fruitless spilling of blood and treasure to no purpose in Iraq, but preserves the capacity of America to wage war against terrorism-which is daily slipping away from us leaving us more and more vulnerable. The criticism which will cascade upon Bush's shoulders from Europe, and the United Nations, and all the rest of the world, will for a time be thunderous but it must be endured because it will pass and it will have been worth it because America will have embarked on a path toward victory. Of course, much of the criticism can be diverted or blunted with verbiage about international cooperation etc.
Bush will have forced the Democrats to choose. In this case they must choose between world opinion and our national security. Finally, and most important, Bush will have led the way out of Iraq by eliminating the casualties while still staying there. He will have done so without being utterly defanged by the left at home and abroad. America will still be theoretically able to wage war in its national security interest, which as of now is in very serious doubt. Both America and the Republican Party will save their souls.
The " other course" in Iraq, which will no doubt be favored by many posters on this thread, that is to push on to "victory," is an unrealistic dream. Forget if you like the facts on the ground which lead many experts to believe the war is now unwinnable, the election has demonstrated beyond paradventure of doubt that the American people will not pay the costs necessary to achieve such a "victory" even if one were attainable.
Whatever course the administration chooses in Iraq, it must redefine its priorities. The focus of the war against terrorism is not in Iraq, indeed it is not in any single geographical place unless it is in the reactor rooms and the Iranian bomb building factories. It must be the overarching imperative of American foreign policy to prevent Iran getting the bomb. Every day we spend in Iraq squanders our power and diminishes our ability to Intimidate Iran or, if necessary, to invade Iran. Everyday we spend in Iraq under these circumstances moves Iran closer to the bomb. Our terrible dilemma has been that we could not fix Iraq and we could not abandon Iraq. Now Bush can temporize no longer he must find a third way.
We are in a mortal struggle with a fanatical, murderous, and suicidal force which would cheerfully murder masses of Americans to win their jihad for Allah. If they can nuke just two or three of our cities the cries for capitulation and submission as a Muslim land will be irresistible and our democracy will be over. The problem: There are 1.4 billion potential suicidal terrorists in the Muslim world and the terrorists need only a handful to nuke us.
Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow's threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. MI5 chief: Terror threat growing http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/11/MNGBRMAJC81.DTL
We cannot win this war unless we find a way to turn the sane Muslim world against the crazies. We cannot do that by shoveling flies in Baghdad and trading casualties in an asymmetrical war where we have so far only demonstrated that we are incapable of of coping with tactics of suicide and murder. We must be able to intimidate if we are going to turn Muslim regimes against terrorists. We cannot do that while floundering in Iraq. If Iran gets the bomb we might not be able to do it at all.
By their voting on Tuesday the American people have expressed that they have come to sense all this.
If you want to restore the conservative dream in America, if you want to rehabilitate the Republican Party, if you want sleep without worrying about the fate of your children and grandchildren in a world of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, we must sort out the Iraq war. If we don’t fix Iraq, we cannot address any of the other deficiencies which cumulatively have visited this electoral disaster upon us. No one will hear us. The Republican Party has two years to show that it is up to the challenge.
