What Voters Really Want
It was, as President Bush put it, a "thumpin'" defeat. The verdict of the American people may be neatly summarized in Oliver Cromwell's lordly dismissal of the rump Parliament: "Depart, and let us have done with you!" Or in the blunt vernacular of the bleacher faithful: "Throw the bums out!"
The votes and the polls reflect an abiding disquiet. Roughly two thirds of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track, only about 35 percent approve of the president's performance, and an anemic 16 percent approve of the performance of Congress. And they're being charitable! It isn't that the rout of the Republicans represents strong support for the Democratic Party. Most Americans would probably describe the choice between the two parties as "the evil of two lessers." Congress failed in its duty to oversee the conduct of the war; it failed in its oversight of government spending; it failed to create an energy policy; its ethics scandals were outrageous. And the Republicans failed their own principles of financial integrity, turning a fiscal surplus of over $230 billion, which George Bush inherited, into a huge deficit albatross.
And let's not forget what some of this excessive spending was all about-political pork. The Washington term for this disgrace is "earmarks"—a better expression might be "pawmarks," for the device that allows politicians to lay their paws on taxpayers' money and spend it on back-home projects like bridges and bicycle paths without going through the normal vetting process. Remember Alaska's infamous $223 million "bridge to nowhere"? The number of "pawmarks" has shot up 10-fold since the Republicans took control of the House in 1994, ballooning from 1,439 to over 14,000 last year.
Lightning rod. All legal, no doubt, but then we have endured illegal sleaze, too: corruption symbolized by Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist, and Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the California congressman now doing federal time after drawing up a menu of bribes for Pentagon contracts approved by his committee. On top of this pile of manure, we have also had a conga line of Republican members of Congress pushing laws favorable to specific corporations and industries, then becoming high-priced lobbyists for their paymasters.
Revolting as it all was, nothing hurt the Republicans more than the mess in Iraq. The possibility of success there was allowed to slip away through a fatal combination of arrogance and incompetence. Iraq, with its tortured history, was never going to be easy, but after 3 ½ years, with dozens of our troops dying each month and the nightly images of utter chaos on the evening news, is it any wonder voters are fed up? The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld was thus inescapable. He had become a lightning rod, despite the fact that he had a lengthy record as a brilliant manager. Somehow or other, he got Iraq wrong and had to pay the price.
Competence has long been a Republican virtue. But it is downright incompetence that so staggered the public-incompetence and cronyism revealed by Hurricane Katrina, the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the half-measures on immigration reform, the scramble to undo the handover of a half-dozen U.S. ports to an Arab-owned company. Perhaps all this might be explained by an administration so wedded to its neoconservative agenda that it treated deviation as heresy and was thus unable to adjust to the changing realities in Iraq. The Republican majority in Congress decided to govern from its base and conducted itself in the most shamelessly partisan way—just at a time when most Americans were seeking bipartisanship and pragmatism. Even now, such behavior may be unlikely, given that we are already in the first week of the next presidential campaign and congressional election.
What we're hearing from both sides now is that they're going to work together. Sorry, that's just not credible. The Democrats' victories in the House and Senate confer on them something considerably less than complete power and certainly nothing like a mandate to govern, since they never sought one in the first place. Many harbor a visceral hatred of George Bush, and key committees will be in the thrall of left-wing extremists. Just because voters may be fed up with George Bush doesn't mean that they want George McGovern. As for President Bush, his post-election press conference failed to strike a convincing note of reconciliation and accommodation. After the pro forma words of bipartisanship, he seemed as uncompromising as ever.
Americans don't want this. They want less politics, more governance, less jawboning, more straight talk.
There's an old gag about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. An optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; a pessimist fears he may be right. Who can be optimistic that we will have anything but an increasingly bitter and partisan Congress? Both parties need to remember the adage "You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there."
This story appears in the November 20, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.