The pundits are already spinning the Election Day story. CNN has an election poll story saying that voters were angry at Bush over Iraq, while there is another story saying that the White House plans to extend an olive branch to the Democrats. Time is proclaiming an end to the Republican Revolution. Newsweek is calling this a humility for the Bush administration. The New York Times says that the election will bring a new landscape to the capitol. McClatchy says that Americans have delivered a message to Bush.
There is a bit of truth in all of these stories. In reality, this was the referendum of President Bush's presidency. This election was the election that should have taken place in 2004, but didn't due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and constant state of fear-mongering. For the past six years, President Bush has been pushing the government further rightwards, while ignoring the center and left constituencies. According to the Los Angeles Times:
Bush and [chief White House political advisor Karl] Rove placed their main emphasis on unifying and energizing Republicans and right-leaning independents with an agenda that focused squarely on the goals of conservatives.
But Tuesday's broad Democratic advance underscored the risks in that approach: In many races, Republicans were overwhelmed by an energized Democratic base and a sharp turn toward the Democrats by moderate swing voters unhappy with the president's performance.
"The story line really is that the Democrats are winning the middle," said Democratic pollster Al Quinlan.
Veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff said: "Iraq is front and center of this election, and people voted for change. The GOP base held — was motivated and voted — but the margins among independents and moderates [for Democrats] was too much to overcome."
The National Election Pool exit polls conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International showed that 80% of voters who disapproved of the Iraq war voted Democratic for Congress, while 80% who approved voted Republican. But only about two in five voters approved of the war, while nearly three-fifths disapproved, according to figures posted by CNN.
In other words, both President Bush and Karl Rove decided that they could govern from the right through a combination of energizing their extreme right base, marginalizing and then ignoring both the center and the left, and finally demonizing any criticism against the Bush administration's policies--President Bush and Karl Rove tried to govern the country as a continuous election campaign, rather than adopting a legislative agenda and policies that would appeal to a broad center of the country. Consider some of these examples: The GOP tied a minimum wage increase with a permanent repeal of the estate tax. There is the entire Katrina disaster, both the Bush administration's failure to recognize andrespond to the emergency, the White House's constant shifting of blame to everyone except themselves, and even suspicions of profiteering as a result of the disaster. President Bush signed an emergency bill "to allow brain-damaged Terri Schiavo's parents to ask a federal judge to prolong their daughter's life," effectively siding with the religious right regarding the Schiavo debate. President Bush instituted a massive domestic spying program with NSA wiretappings, and allowed the FBI to investigate anti-war protesters. It is this type of governing from the hard right that has angered both the center and the left, creating a voting bloc that has now shot down President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress.
Iraq. If there is any issue or policy that defines the Bush presidency, it is Iraq. The Bush administration started marketing their invasion of Iraq just before the 2002 midterm elections. President Bush argued that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Then National Security Advisor Condi Rice declared that Iraq's nuclear program should not advance from "the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." President Bush had also declared that Iraq had high-level contacts with al Qaeda. The Bush administration even found a way to link Saddam Hussein with the September 11th attacks. This argument of Iraq being responsible for the 9/11 attacks continued into 2004, This line of argument continued in September 2006, where Vice President Cheney insisted that Iraq was still developing WMDs, and had contacts with al Qaeda. The Bush administration chose to go to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has consistently attacked critics of their war in Iraq, claiming such critics would "rewrite the history of how that war began," calling such critics "Dishonest and Reprehensible," and even aiding the terrorists. Even as the Bush administration was receiving reports on the deteriorating situation in Iraq just before the election, the administration continued to spin U.S. progress in Iraq, even to the point of claiming that the increase in Iraqi violence was linked to the 2006 midterm elections. The Bush White House chose to go to war in Iraq. The war turned sour on them. And in the end, the administration was forced to deal with the consequences of this disaster, where "57 percent of all voters disapprove of the war in Iraq and 58 percent disapprove of Bush's job performance." Iraq was a decisive factor in the Republican's defeat.
Of course, there is certainly more. Hurricane Katrina was just as an important domestic factor against the Bush White House, with both criticism mounting against the government's response to Katrina, and the consequential political effects of the disaster. But the real smoking gun here had to be the release of the videotape a presidential videoconference where ex-Fema chief Michael Brown gave stark warnings of the disaster New Orleans would be facing as Katrina would hit the city a day later. President Bush sat at a table in a small room at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He did not ask any questions. This videotape showed both the Bush administration's insensitivity towards average Americans, and their incompetence at responding quickly towards a crisis. And while Katrina may not have been immediately on their minds as Americans voted, the disaster certainly contributed towards the long-term souring of the Bush administration's job performance.
Finally, there is the Republican scandals and "culture of corruption." This certainly played a major part in the American voter's revolt against the Republican Party. The Washington Post reported that "Indictments, investigations and allegations of wrongdoing have helped put at least 15 Republican House seats in jeopardy...." And this wasn't just the Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, or Mark Foley scandals. On November 3, 2006, the Associated Press reported that GOP Representative Don Sherwood had paid his mistress Cynthia Ore $500,000 to not reveal publicly allegations that Sherwood had chocked her. Virginia Senator George Allen was continuously plagued with allegations of using racist statements, and was even caught saying that a 20-year-old volunteer of Indian descent was a "macaca," which is a racial slur against African immigrants. The real damage here to the Allen campaign was that the "macaca" comment was videotaped by that same Indian volunteer. Of course, the Allen campaign was also marred in another scandal where staff members assaulted blogger Mike Stark as he tried to question Allen about his sealed divorce records. The assault on Mike Stark was captured on video. And finally, we've got the drug and gay sex scandal involving televangelist Ted Haggard, which came out just three days before the election. I have never seen as many scandals being exposed in the last months--and even the last couple of weeks--before the election, as I have seen with this Republican Party. Even as the American voters were exposed to these latest scandals, they were also continually reminded of the long-running GOP scandals involving both Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay. All of this was pounded into the American voters just before they went to the polls.
So what will happen next? Obviously, the Bush administration will have to find a new way to deal with a Democratically-controlled House, and possibly a Democratically-controlled Senate. The American people decided for a change in Washington. They decided for a course change away from the Bush administration's agenda by providing the Democrats with control of their own branch of government. We are now back to a divided government. The question now is whether both the Democrats in Congress and the Republicans in the Bush White House will both accept real compromise in solving the serious problems this nation is embroiled in.
No comments:
Post a Comment