US election roundup: more of everything good and funny and new you need to know

1. Drapes of Wrath – by MAUREEN DOWD/NY Times

The new Democratic sweep conjures up an ancient image: Furies swooping down to punish bullies.

Angry winged goddesses with dog heads, serpent hair and blood eyes, unmoved by tears, prayer, sacrifice or nasty campaign ads, avenging offenses by insolent transgressors.

This will be known as the year macho politics failed — mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men. Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability. They were ready to trade in the deadbeat Daddy party for the sheltering Mommy party.

All the conservative sneering about a fem-lib from San Francisco who was measuring the drapes for the speaker’s office didn’t work. Americans wanted new drapes, and an Armani granny with a whip in charge.

A recent study found that the testosterone of American men has been dropping for 20 years, but in Republican Washington, it was running amok, and not in a good way. Men who had refused to go to an untenable war themselves were now refusing to find an end to another untenable war that they had recklessly started.

Republicans were oddly oblivious to the fact that they had turned into a Thomas Nast cartoon: an unappetizing tableau of bloated, corrupt, dissembling, feckless white hacks who were leaving kids unprotected. Tom DeLay and Bob Ney sneaking out of Congress with dollar bills flying out of their pockets. Denny Hastert playing Cardinal Bernard Law, shielding Mark Foley. Rummy, cocky and obtuse as he presided over an imploding Iraq, while failing to give young men and women in the military the armor, support and strategy they needed to come home safely. Dick Cheney, vowing bullheadedly to move “full speed ahead” on Iraq no matter what the voters decided. W. frantically yelling about how Democrats would let the terrorists win, when his lame-brained policies had spawned more terrorists.

After 9/11, Americans had responded to bellicosity, drawn to the image, as old as the Western frontier myth, of the strong father protecting the home from invaders. But this time, many voters, especially women, rejected the rough Rovian scare and divide tactics.

The macho poses and tough talk of the cowboy president were undercut when he seemed flaccid in the face of the vicious Katrina and the vicious Iraq insurgency.

Even former members of the administration conceded they were tired of the muscle-bound style, longing for a more maternal approach to the globe. “We were exporting our anger and our fear, hatred for what had happened,” Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, said in a speech in Australia, referring to the 9/11 attacks. He said America needed “to turn another face to the world and get back to more traditional things, such as the export of hope and opportunity and inspiration.”

Talking about hope and opportunity and inspiration has propelled Barack Obama into the presidential arena. His approach seems downright feminine when compared with the Bushies, or even Hillary Clinton. He languidly poses in fashion magazines, shares feelings with Oprah and dishes with the ladies on “The View.” After six years of chest-puffing, Senator Obama seems very soothing.

Because of the power of female consumers, some marketing experts predict we will end up a matriarchy. This year, women also flexed their muscle at the polls, transformed into electoral Furies by the administration’s stubborn course in Iraq.

On Tuesday, 51 percent of the voters were women, and 55 percent of women voted for the Democratic candidate. It was a revival of the style of Bill Clinton, dubbed our first female president, who knitted together a winning coalition of independents, moderates and suburbanites.

According to The Times’s exit polls, women were more likely than men to want some or all of the troops to be withdrawn from Iraq now, and 64 percent of women said that the war in Iraq has not improved U.S. security.

The Senate has a new high of 16 women and the House has a new high of at least 70, with a few races outstanding. Hillary’s big win will strengthen her presidential tentacles.

Nancy Pelosi, who will be the first female speaker, softened her voice and look as she cracked the whip on her undisciplined party, taking care not to sound shrill. When she needs to, though, she says she can use her “mother-of-five voice.”

At least for the moment, W. isn’t blustering and Cheney has lost his tubby swagger. The president is trying to ride the Mommy vibe. He even offered Madame Speaker help with those new drapes.


2. 2006: The Year of the ‘Macaca’ – by FRANK RICH/NY Times

OF course, the “ thumpin’ ” was all about Iraq. But let us not forget Katrina. It was the collision of the twin White House calamities in August 2005 that foretold the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Back then, the full measure of the man finally snapped into focus for most Americans, sending his poll numbers into the 30s for the first time. The country saw that the president who had spurned a grieving wartime mother camping out in the sweltering heat of Crawford was the same guy who had been unable to recognize the depth of the suffering in New Orleans’s fetid Superdome. This brand of leadership was not the “compassionate conservatism” that had been sold in all those photo ops with African-American schoolchildren. This was callous conservatism, if not just plain mean.

It’s the kind of conservatism that remains silent when Rush Limbaugh does a mocking impersonation of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s symptoms to score partisan points. It’s the kind of conservatism that talks of humane immigration reform but looks the other way when candidates demonize foreigners as predatory animals. It’s the kind of conservatism that pays lip service to “tolerance” but stalls for days before taking down a campaign ad caricaturing an African-American candidate as a sexual magnet for white women.

This kind of politics is now officially out of fashion. Harold Ford did lose his race in Tennessee, but by less than three points in a region that has not sent a black man to the Senate since Reconstruction. Only 36 years old and hugely talented, he will rise again even as the last vestiges of Jim Crow tactics continue to fade and Willie Horton ads countenanced by a national political party join the Bush dynasty in history’s dustbin.

Elsewhere, the 2006 returns more often than not confirmed that Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are far better people than this cynical White House takes them for. This election was not a rebuke merely of the reckless fiasco in Iraq but also of the divisive ideology that had come to define the Bush-Rove-DeLay era. This was the year that Americans said a decisive no to the politics of “macaca” just as firmly as they did to pre-emptive war and Congressional corruption.

For all of Mr. Limbaugh’s supposed clout, his nasty efforts did not defeat the ballot measure supporting stem-cell research in his native state, Missouri. The measure squeaked through, helping the Democratic senatorial candidate knock out the Republican incumbent. (The other stem-cell advocates endorsed by Mr. Fox in campaign ads, in Maryland and Wisconsin, also won.) Arizona voters, despite their proximity to the Mexican border, defeated two of the crudest immigrant-bashing demagogues running for Congress, including one who ran an ad depicting immigrants menacing a JonBenet Ramsey look-alike. (Reasserting its Goldwater conservative roots, Arizona also appears to be the first state to reject an amendment banning same-sex marriage .) Nationwide, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote fell from 44 percent in 2004 to 29 percent this year. Hispanics aren’t buying Mr. Bush’s broken-Spanish shtick anymore; they saw that the president, despite his nuanced take on immigration, never stood up forcefully to the nativists in his own camp when it counted most, in an election year.

But for those who’ve been sickened by the Bush-Rove brand of politics, surely the happiest result of 2006 was saved for last: Jim Webb’s ousting of Senator George Allen in Virginia. It is all too fitting that this race would be the one that put the Democrats over the top in the Senate. Mr. Allen was the slickest form of Bush-Rove conservative, complete with a strategist who’d helped orchestrate the Swift Boating of John Kerry . Mr. Allen was on a fast track to carry that banner into the White House once Mr. Bush was gone. His demise was so sudden and so unlikely that it seems like a fairy tale come true.

As recently as April 2005, hard as it is to believe now, Mr. Allen was chosen in a National Journal survey of Beltway insiders as the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 2008. Political pros saw him as a cross between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush whose “affable” conservatism and (contrived) good-old-boy persona were catnip to voters. His Senate campaign this year was a mere formality; he began with a double-digit lead .

That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as “macaca, or whatever his name is,” Mr. Allen added, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”

The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com , the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children. Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time; the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic like a rabid virus. Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule. Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew . It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn’t be blamed on the bottle.

Mr. Allen has a history of racial insensitivity . He used to display a Confederate flag in his living room and, bizarrely enough, a noose in his office for sentimental reasons that he could never satisfactorily explain. His defense in the macaca incident was that he had no idea that the word, the term for a genus of monkey, had any racial connotation. But even if he were telling the truth — even if Mr. Allen were not a racist — his non-macaca words were just as damning. “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia” was unmistakably meant to demean the young man as an unwashed immigrant, whatever his race. It was a typical example of the us-versus-them stridency that has defined the truculent Bush-Rove fearmongering: you’re either with us or you’re a traitor, possibly with the terrorists.

As it happened, the “macaca” who provoked the senator’s self-destruction, S. R. Sidarth, was not an immigrant but the son of immigrants. He was born in Washington’s Virginia suburbs to well-off parents (his father is a mortgage broker) and is the high-achieving graduate of a magnet high school, a tournament chess player, a former intern for Joe Lieberman, a devoted member of his faith (Hindu) and, currently, a senior at the University of Virginia. He is even a football jock like Mr. Allen. In other words, he is an exemplary young American who didn’t need to be “welcomed” to his native country by anyone. The Sidarths are typical of the families who have abetted the rapid growth of northern Virginia in recent years, much as immigrants have always built and renewed our nation. They, not Mr. Allen with his nostalgia for the Confederate “heritage,” are America’s future. It is indeed just such northern Virginians who have been tinting the once reliably red commonwealth purple.

Though the senator’s behavior was toxic, the Bush-Rove establishment rewarded it. Its auxiliaries from talk radio, the blogosphere and the Wall Street Journal opinion page echoed the Allen campaign’s complaint that the incident was inflated by the news media, especially The Washington Post. Once it became clear that Mr. Allen was in serious trouble, conservative pundits mainly faulted him for running an “awful campaign,” not for being an awful person.

The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen’s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of “faith.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the exit polls Tuesday was that the base did turn out for Mr. Rove: white evangelicals voted in roughly the same numbers as in 2004, and 71 percent of them voted Republican, hardly a mass desertion from the 78 percent of last time. But his party was routed anyway. It was the end of the road for the boy genius and his can’t-miss strategy that Washington sycophants predicted could lead to a permanent Republican majority.

What a week this was! Here’s to the voters of both parties who drove a stake into the heart of our political darkness. If you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing George Allen: Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America.


3. Just A Step Forward--But What a Step! -- by Chris Bowers/MyDD

Here is where we stand right now:
National Sweep. Democrats take the national majority in the House, Senate, Governors, and State Legislatures. The only thing Republicans have left--Bush--still sports a sub-40% approval rating.

We won bigger than they ever did. Democrats look set to take the House, and with a larger majority than Republicans ever had during their 1994-2006 "revolution." We also won more Senate campaigns in a single cycle, 23-24, than either party has won since at least 1980.

Republicans shut out: No House, Senate, or Governor pickups for Republicans. That breaks every record for futility. No one can ever do worse than they did this year.

Geographic shift. This is the first time in 54 years that the party without a southern majority now has the House majority. Power flows to coasts. Tom Schaller utterly vindicated.

Progressive Caucus Rising. Make no mistake about it--a member of the Progressive Caucus is now speaker of the House. Further, both Progressive caucus members who ran for Senate won easily, Sanders in Vermont and Brown in Ohio. And now, the Progressive Caucus will control half of all House committees.

Blue District Victories. Wave of new conservative Democrats, my ass. Mark down House victories in NH-01, NH-02, NY-24, FL-22, PA-07, PA-08, IA-01, IA-02, CO-07, AZ-08, KY-03, CT-05, CA-11, MN-01, and NY-19. Now someone tell me again how the new wave of Democrats is overwhelmingly conservative with these districts and reps making up the majority of the new class.

Netroots victories.

Republicans beaten at the top of their game. Republicans broke all of their fundraising and voter contact records this year. They had better maps than ever before. They had a better opportunity to pass whatever legislation they liked than every before. And they were still crushed.

Many Democrats desperate to immediately lose majority. Some can't bash party's grassroots and left-wing fast enough in order to, supposedly, make themselves look better. Would rather improve personal position on Sunday talk show circuit than stay in power.

We are just getting started. This is a big step, and much need vindication for our efforts. But it is still just a step. This is no time to start being risk-averse. We must continue to pursue the strategies that brought us here: silent revolution, fifty-state strategy, small donor explosion, progressive movement, we are all in this together.

A big thank you goes out to every Democrat who didn't run against the Democratic Party in this election cycle. Those who stuck with us can share in the spoils. Those who didn't can stick it, and expect continuing retribution. The Democratic Party won tonight. If you ran from it, then you lost. Even if you didn't lose today, you loss is coming soon. Count on it.

And now, we govern.

P.S. Carol Shea-Porter for DCCC chair!


4. An Uneasy Alliance between Dems & Left Bloggers – by NICHOLAS CONFESSORE/NY Times

AMID all the post-election bliss evident within the constellation of bloggers and online Democratic activists known as the “netroots” last week, there was a note of anger and disappointment. Ned Lamont , the antiwar Connecticut businessman who defeated Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the August Democratic primary with strong support from the netroots, lost to the newly independent Mr. Lieberman on Tuesday, even as antiwar Democrats across the nation romped to upset victories.

It was the fall campaign’s signal clash between the Internet grass roots, which have become a growing political force since the 2004 presidential race, and the Democratic establishment, where big-money donors and incumbency rule. In Connecticut, the establishment won. Some bloggers fumed that Beltway Democrats had abandoned Mr. Lamont.

“The D.C. Senate Democrats and D.C. lobbyists are not on our side,” wrote the Lamont backer Matt Stoller on the liberal Web site MyDD, a major node for the netroots’ self-organizing multitudes. “They have their own side, a side that is out of touch, immoral, and dishonest.” The establishment, he wrote a few days before the election, had stuck a “knife in our back.”

It was the latest round in the long battle between leading netroots activists and their critics, real and perceived, among Washington’s Democratic elite. But such disagreements may soon be on the wane. As the smoke began to clear after Election Day, two things seemed clear. Though the netroots have forever changed how campaigns raise money and find votes, the results demonstrated that they cannot yet win elections on their own. But the Democratic Party cannot win major national elections without the netroots.

“The establishment needs them, and they need the establishment,” said Carol C. Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University .

Like the music obsessives who plunked down $500 for first-generation iPods, Web-based activists served as the party’s early adopters in 2006, just as they provided much of the early money and vigor behind Howard Dean ’s 2004 presidential campaign. This year, they coalesced around dozens of House and Senate candidates in highly unfavorable states or Congressional districts, showering them with seed donations and praise while softening up G.O.P. incumbents with amateur opposition research, campaign stunts and homemade Web advertising.

Answerable to no one in particular, they could sometimes go off-key: During the Democratic primary, a blog supporting Mr. Lamont put up an altered photograph of Mr. Lieberman showing the senator in blackface, much to Mr. Lamont’s embarrassment.

They were also sometimes poor judges of what will sell in the larger political marketplace; most of the 19 netroots-supported candidates listed on ActBlue, an online clearinghouse for donations to Democrats, lost on Tuesday. But the online activists also gave some once-underrated candidates — like the Senate candidates Jon Tester and Jim Webb , in Montana and Virginia, respectively, and the House candidates Paul Hodes in New Hampshire and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania — a chance to be taken seriously. All ended up winning on Tuesday.

“It was the early support, the attention — the ability to create opportunities for candidates to break out with energy and passion,” said Jonah Seiger, a Democratic Internet strategist.

Thanks in part to the netroots, said Mr. Seiger, the more promising candidates got a second or third look from the mainstream news media, major donors and party officials, especially as the political environment became increasingly unfavorable to Republicans.

Mr. Webb, for example, was essentially drafted last winter by a network of national and Virginia-based netroots activists, who later helped him gather 10,000 signatures in three weeks to get on the Democratic primary ballot.

“They’re a group of people who put their money where their mouth is,” said Jessica Vanden Berg, Mr. Webb’s campaign manager. “They gave Jim — who didn’t have a campaign staff in the beginning or a financial base — they gave him a political base to jump from.”

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would go on to endorse Mr. Webb in the primary, and later poured nearly $7 million into his race against Republican George Allen , who conceded on Thursday, cementing the Democrats’ new Senate majority.

In some cases, the party even got behind some netroots-favored candidates that it had previously ignored or discouraged. In California’s 11th district, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee initially backed Steve Filson, a Navy veteran, over Gerald McNerney, the chief executive of a wind-turbine company who had the support of the Internet grass roots. But after Mr. McNerney won the primary, the committee spent half a million dollars on the general election. He won.

Of course, it’s difficult to say what particular factor provided the edge in a close race. But last week, onetime antagonists seemed willing to share credit for the Democratic sweep. Shortly before 9 a.m. on Election Day, Harry Reid , the Senate minority leader — and soon to be majority leader — posted an entry on the popular liberal blog Daily Kos, titled “You got us here.” Without the netroots, Mr. Reid wrote, “Democrats would not be in the position we are in today.”

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the combative founder of Daily Kos, returned the favor. “I’m ready to get beyond the ‘who gets credit’ conversation, because we all do,” Mr. Moulitsas wrote last week.

All told, the Democratic netroots and the party’s traditional establishment managed to form an uneasy — and in many cases unintended — collaboration. What happens next is less clear, especially as the Democratic leadership moves from campaigning to governing.

“It’s in part the job of the netroots to challenge the establishment,” said Simon Rosenberg, the president of New Democrat Network, who has served as a bridge between party officials and leading netroots organizers. “It’s their job to not be satisfied. That’s why this is a complicated relationship. But through this healthy tension — this dialogue and debate — I think we’ll end up with a stronger party.”


5. What a Mandate! Popular Vote For Senate Was 55%-43% Democratic – by R.J. Eskow/Huffington Post

Look how easily the media manipulates everyone's perceptions, including our own. An hour of vote tabulation reveals a stunning fact: Democrats won the popular vote for the Senate by an overwhelming 12.6% margin - 55%/42.4%. "Bipartisanship" and "compromise" are today's buzzwords, when the phrase on everybody's lips should be "mandate for dramatic change" - especially in Iraq.

Contrast the media's performance this week with its reaction to the 2004 election results. The overwhelming catchphrase that November was "political capital." Bush had squeaked through with the tiniest popular vote margin of any postwar President, yet was hailed as a leader with a popular mandate to continue his extremist policies.

(For Bush and the media, apparently not actually losing before being appointed was exciting enough.)

What a short road from "political capital" to "need for bipartisanship." Nobody lectured the Bush team in '04 about the need to act in a bipartisan manner - even though, as I pointed out then , the Democratic popular vote mandate in the Senate was as great as Bush's. (Only the Senate's highly unrepresentative form of democracy resulted in a GOP victory that year.)

The other catchphrase on everyone's lips this week is "conservative Democrat." Chris Bowers effectively demolished the myth that Democrats won because of Emanuel's push to recruit conservatives, or that this election somehow represents a victory for the right.

Here's a brain-teaser for the pundits and those who read them: We've just spent an entire election season being lectured about the Lieberman/Lamont primary. We were told that it proved Democrats were Stalinist, overly leftist, and would purge anyone who "deviated from the party line on Iraq."

Now we're being informed that the only reason Democrats won was because they ran a slate of right-wingers. Think about it: Both statements can't be true. Then again, the spinmeisters and thought-shapers don't need to be consistent. They just need to keep the drumbeat going, so that everyone ends up believing it through sheer repetition.

The conservative media machine is the one force in American politics that has proven to be truly "bipartisan."

Now James Carville wants to overthrow Howard Dean , chief architect of this week's success, for right-wing Democrat Harold Ford. That would be the same James Carville who never won a popular-vote majority for President with Bill Clinton, the most gifted politician of his generation. (He's also the same Carville who leaked Kerry strategy secrets to the GOP in 2004.) It would be a grave mistake to listen to him now.

Don't get me wrong: Bipartisanship has its place. But the public and the politicians need to understand that the voters have spoken clearly for change. It's incumbent on our leaders to work in a bipartisan way - to make that change happen.

For a nation bogged down in Iraq, voters have just delivered the 12-and-a-half percent solution.


6. The US Conservative Project Has Taken An Existential Hit
Thanks to Bush and Iraq, the Republican coalition that has come to dominate America suffered a huge crash
By Martin Kettle/The Guardian

In spare moments since Tuesday's American elections I have been replying to a backlog of emails. Big deal, you may say. But these were not run-of-the-mill correspondents. They were Americans who wrote to me after last week's column. This argued - correctly, as it turned out - that the Democrats were about to win the midterms, perhaps handsomely, while warning that the party should not mistake a revolt over Iraq for a wider political endorsement.

When you challenge the gospel according to King George, you should don a tin helmet. Last weekend was no exception. The electronic abuse started early and kept coming. I was a pinko jerk who had no right to comment about America. I would have been writing my article in German had it not been for Uncle Sam. I would be eating crow come Tuesday. The reader who invited me to "pound sand, you fucking lib foreign moron dipshit" was not alone in his views.

It was not the rudeness that made me write back after Tuesday suggesting that some apology might be in order. It was the denial about what was so clearly going to happen in the midterms. Every poll for months had signalled a serious Republican defeat. Reporting from America in May, I was told that no Republican strategist believed they could hold the House of Representatives. As David Broder, the dean of American political reporters, wrote this week: "Never was a political wipeout better advertised in advance than the one that hit the Republican party on Tuesday." Which part of the word defeat did my correspondents not understand?

What happened this week was not complex. It was the crash of the conservative political project begun by Newt Gingrich in 1994 and crystallised under George Bush since 2000. It was the crash heard round the world. It came in the form of a nationwide protest against the Iraq war and Bush's presidency. A new survey of actual voters, conducted since election day by Bill Clinton's former pollster, Stan Greenberg, confirms that Iraq was by far the most important issue that influenced Americans' votes. The divide among those for whom Iraq was the most important issue went 3:1 in favour of the Democrats. That, in a nutshell, explains what happened.

The use of the word crash is important if we are to understand the new situation in Washington. This was not an election in which the traditional Democratic vote finally roused itself to overturn Republican rule. It was an election in which the Republican coalition that has gradually come to dominate America since the civil-rights acts of the 1960s suffered a huge existential hit as a result of Bush and Iraq.

The Democrats did not just win among the usual groups such as the poor, women and black people. This time they won among the middle class too, among small-town voters, among every age group and - crucially and emphatically - among independents and moderates. Even where the Democrats lost they polled significantly, taking 45% in the south, 28% of white evangelical Christians, 20% of conservatives and 15% of people who voted for Bush in 2004. These strong showings among unlikely groups help explain why Democrats won congressional seats in so many "red" states this week and why the win that finally gave them control of the senate came from the near south.

No one can say if this is an epochal hit or one from which the Republicans will bounce back in 2008. But the implications of the 2006 crash are fascinating. This is not the creation of a new majority, Greenberg stresses, but a lot of space has nevertheless opened up in which the Democrats could do even better in future. Clearly such optimism has to be highly contingent. Only a fool would overstate it. Karl Rove has not become incompetent overnight. But this week defies the argument in influential recent books that America is a conclusively conservative country.

It will take time for this to sink in among conservative Republicans. This election has been a major blow to their self-image and world-view. Like the Thatcherites, they got used to assuming that they were always right and would always be victorious. On Tuesday the voters told them they were wrong. It has taken many false starts for the Conservative party to get back in the game in Britain. Something similar could happen to the suddenly weakened Republicans. But there's nothing they like more than a fight.

What will this traumatic domestic political event mean for America's relations with the rest of the world? Three main answers suggest themselves. The first is the reminder that the problem is not America but this American administration. Foreigners have had the useful reminder that Americans are not nuts. Greenberg's poll shows that in modern times Americans have never been more multilateralist in foreign policy than they are today, with 58% agreeing that America's security "depends on building strong ties with other nations" compared with 34% who think it depends "on its own military strength". I doubt that many American politicians will trust that finding, but in the long run nothing is more important than the change from America as part of the problem to America as part of the solution.

Second, a weakened presidency inevitably means a weakened America. And that means less not more American foreign policy during Bush's final two years. The Democratic agenda is a domestic one, Iraq apart. In the short run that may be a relief all round. But it means fewer good initiatives as well as fewer bad ones. The fall of Donald Rumsfeld does not portend the rise of Condoleezza Rice. Bush will have his work cut out dealing with Congress and trying to extricate America from Iraq. Rice is manoeuvring to be her party's vice-presidential nominee. It's stay-at-home time for America. Good news for Iran, which now more than ever must believe it is playing a winning hand. Bad news for Palestine.

And Iraq? Those who expect a sudden sea change may be disappointed. It won't be a 180-degree shift, a senior British Washington-watcher suggests. But maybe a 60-degree shift is now on the cards. The name of the game now is minimising the damage of a lost war. With Democratic approval, American policy has been explicitly subcontracted to James Baker and his Iraq Study Group. But that doesn't in itself solve the problem. The damage of Bush's Iraq adventure has just got bigger, not smaller. It now stretches from the streets of Baghdad and Basra into the heart of the once triumphalist and now humbled Republican party.


7. For Conservatives, It’s Back to Basics -- by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JASON DePARLE/NY Times

THE morning after the Republican drubbing in the midterm elections, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the party, headed to the weekly coalition meeting where limited government conservatives, Christian traditionalists and gun-rights groups gathered to plot strategy. He brought a message they were only too eager to hear.

The election, he told the crowd at the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform, was not a repudiation of conservatism. It was a mandate to “recommit ourselves to being reform conservatives,” he said, telling them that the president would not flinch from arguing for ideas like privatizing Social Security.

Recalling a line Woody Allen used to break up with a girlfriend in the movie “Annie Hall,” Mr. Mehlman said, “If a shark doesn’t keep moving he dies.” He added, “I think the same is true of political parties.”

Thirty years after the birth of the conservative movement, some stalwarts worry the shark may be heading into shallow waters. At the coalition meeting, one organizer after another complained that their Democratic opponents had staked out moderate to conservative stands on what had been the movement’s most potent issues — abortion , gun rights, religious expression, income taxes and the federal deficit.

Perhaps most of all, a movement once galvanized by a shared determination to end Soviet Communism now finds itself deeply divided over the Iraq war.

“Our successes are killing us,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform who convenes the weekly meeting. He compared Tuesday’s election to the story of the princess and the pea, with the pea being liberal governance.

“Whenever we solve a problem — like cutting taxes or destroying the Soviet Union — we are in effect adding another mattress,” he said. “We have to go back to the voters and convince them, ‘you still can’t sleep because the goddamn pea is killing you.’ ”

Assessing the Republican losses, liberals quickly pronounced the end of the 30-year rise of the conservative movement. Conservatives prefer to talk of a temporary crisis. Since the election, a chorus from the right has been noisily distinguishing between conservative and Republican, blaming deviation from conservative principles for the election losses. From George Will to Rush Limbaugh , conservatives cut loose with criticisms of the Republicans for spending too much at home and getting bogged down in Iraq.

“Apostasy,” Mr. Will declared.

But as conservatives vow to regroup and return, many acknowledged that the path ahead may be a tough slog. The combination of Democratic moderation and Republican governance has blunted many of the right’s sharpest attacks on the left. And some conservatives acknowledged that distancing themselves from the unpopular policies of their Republican allies might not be easy.

“What is being rejected is not conservatism,” said David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “It’s something far different. The problem is we’re identified with it. If the wagon goes off the cliff, you’re likely to go with it.”

Liberals are writing the movement’s obituary. John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton , called the midterms “the end of the grand conservative experiment.”

The pillars of the movement, Mr. Podesta said, had collapsed under the weight of conservative rule: “stewardship of the Iraq war” had undercut conservatives’ credibility on national security; budget deficits and stagnant wages had discredited tax cuts; and Congressional scandals had given the lie to the movement’s moral values. As a result, he said, the Reagan Democrats were returning.

Conservatives, though, say the midterm election was less about ideology than the result of the war in Iraq, which many now disavow as an un-conservative idea, wrongly associated with their movement by a faction of the right known as neoconservatives.

The intellectual heirs to a group of Democrats whose opposition to Communism pulled them to the right during the cold war, the neoconservatives believe that the United States should be willing to apply military force to fight terrorism and to promote democracy abroad. American conservatives have traditionally favored the use of force only for self-defense, broadly interpreted to include containing Communism during the cold war.

“There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’ ” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.”

Neoconservatives, in response, say others on the right were happy to support the war when it helped rally voters in 2002 and 2004. Gary J. Schmitt, a neoconservative foreign policy adviser in the Reagan administration, said some were “jumping ship when the going gets tough.”

And if they back away from the rationale for the war, said William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative magazine Weekly Standard, conservatives may give up their status as the forceful party on national defense, jeopardizing their long-term prospects for a governing majority. “As a political matter, conservatives should try to help Bush succeed because they are not going to get very far distancing themselves from him,” Mr. Kristol said.

Whatever their views on the war, though, conservatives agree on aspect of the midterms: Republicans may have lost, but their ideology did not. Among other things, they argue that the midterms turned both the Republican and Democratic caucuses further to the right. In the House, the Republicans who lost tended to be moderates from politically mixed districts, while the conservative caucus, the House Republican Study Committee, expects to have roughly the same number of members — about 110, making committed conservatives an even larger majority within the party. And as House Republicans begin campaigning for party leadership posts, all the candidates are framing their arguments around returning the party to its conservative roots.

Democrats, meanwhile, have arguably grown more conservative as well. After two decades of defeats, they have largely dropped their former calls for major defense spending cuts, talk of a Canadian-style national health insurance, or campaigns for gun control. They work hard to avoid getting tagged as tax raisers, and since 2004 they have tried to open their doors to opponents of abortion as well.

To be sure, many Democrats campaigned this fall for increasing the minimum wage, preserving the estate tax or a prompt withdrawal from Iraq. But the party made many of its gains in both the House and the Senate by recruiting candidates with conservative views on abortion and gun rights, most notably Bob Casey Jr., the senator-elect in Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, representative-elect from North Carolina.

Even the massacre of a school full of Amish children did not move the Democrats to renew their calls for gun control — a stark contrast to the party of 1990s. “The Democrats didn’t do anything,” Mr. Norquist marveled.

The election has expanded the ranks of the 47-member, centrist New Democrat Coalition by as much as a third, and the 37-member conservative Blue Dog Coalition says it expects nine new members.

If the Democrats have backed away on those fronts, what’s left for the conservative movement? Aside from the neoconservatives, conservatives have focused on a single theme: the steep growth of federal spending under Republican rule.

“The greatest scandal in Washington, D.C., is runaway federal spending,” Representative Mike Pence of Indiana declared in the opening statement of his campaign to become majority leader.

Morton Blackwell, who was President Reagan ’s liaison to the conservative movement, said spending was in some ways the last frontier for conservative organizers. “On guns, on life, on the right to work” — that is, gun ownership, abortion rights, and opposition to organized labor — “the strongest supporters of the conservative cause have been identified,” he said. “Those who will write checks on those issues have been identified, and the people who are concerned most on those issues are already part of organizations and donor lists run by very effective people.”

But selling spending reductions may not be as easy as selling tax cuts, which first ignited the conservative grass roots. “It is the problem of concentrated benefits and diffused costs,” Mr. Blackwell said. “For the people who want a spending program, it is the most important thing in their lives. They want and need that spending. They will work day and night to get that spending. But the cost is so diffuse it is hard to find people who have similar opposition to it.”

ASSESSING the election, William F. Buckley Jr. , who founded the National Review magazine and helped define the movement, said he was not optimistic about the immediate future. “The conservative movement is in a sense inanimate, compared to 20 or 30 years ago,” he said.

As for the spending habits of the Republican Congress, “there is a kind of ideological slovenliness which affects the morale,” Mr. Buckley said. “It is as if the American Civil Liberties Union were every couple of days to favor proscribing a particular book or a particular performance or something, causing people to look at the A.C.L.U. and wonder if it had a credible mission.”

He was not sure what might revive the movement, especially since the current combination of low taxes, high government spending and moderate inflation tends to create a sense of economic prosperity — at least in the short term.

“It will perhaps take something like a depreciation of the dollar, something electric,” he said. If countries “stop subsidizing our debt it will be terrible shock to a lot of people, and then I think conservative reservoirs of thought would be consulted.”


8. The Great Victory - crushing the developing myths – by Glenn Greenwald

The outcome of this election -- even with the not-yet-fully-finalized Senate victories in Virginia and Montana -- is as resounding and clear as it gets. For exactly that reason, all sorts of devastated Bush followers and confused and desperate media mavens are busy spawning myths about what happened -- often, in the case of the mindless pundits, unwittingly, even unconsciously. Most Americans know exactly what happened here, but it is nonetheless vital that these myths be smashed from the start and the clear lessons of this election be safeguarded:

(1) This is a shattering and humiliating defeat for the Republican Party. The excuse that it is just run-of-the-mill, standard sixth-presidential-year impatience is pure nonsense. In the sixth year of President Clinton's presidency, Democrats in the midterm elections gained seats in the House and there was no change in the Senate.

When a President and his political party are liked and their positions are in line with what Americans want, they win, even in the allegedly cursed "sixth presidential year." By contrast, when a President is deeply unpopular and his party perceived to be rife with radicalism and corruption, they lose. And when that perception is particularly strong and widespread, they lose badly. That is what happened here, and there is nothing mundane about. These results are extraordinary, and every Bush follower knows it.

(2) This was a resounding and emphatic rejection of the core, defining premises of the so-called "conservative" movement and what has morphed into the grotesque Republican Party. Nobody doubts that Americans vigorously rejected George Bush and his signature policy -- the invasion of Iraq. But it wasn't only Bush and Iraq.

Democratic candidates won -- in every part of the country and regardless of their ideology -- by committing themselves to one basic platform. They vigorously opposed what have become the defining attributes of the Republican Party and they pledged to put a stop to them: unchecked Presidential power, mindless warmongering, a refusal to accept or acknowledge realities (both in Iraq and generally), and the deep-seated, fundamental corruption fueling the Bush movement and sustaining their power.

Virtually every Democratic winner, from the most conservative to the most liberal, in the reddest and bluest states, have that in common. They all ran on a platform of putting a stop to the radicalism, deceit and corruption that drives the so-called "conservative" political movement.

Yes, it is true that some of the Democratic winning candidates are pro-life and/or opposed to gay marriage. None of that is new (Democrats are led in the Senate by a pro-life politician and most of them are on record opposing gay marriage). Their doing so prevented the Rovian Republicans from creating sideshows designed to obscure and distract from the vast damage which these Republicans have done to the country. But abortion and gay marriage aren't the issues that determined, or even meaningfully influenced, the outcome of this election, and everyone knows that.

Democrats didn't win by pretending to be anything. Democrats won because they emphatically and unapologetically vowed to oppose what the Republican Party has become and to put an end to its deeply corrupt and destructive one-party rule -- and that is what Americans, more than anything else, wanted.

(3) Republicans lost in every region and were defeated in critical races even in the reddest of states, such as Kansas, Indiana and Arkansas. The Republicans are rapidly collapsing into a regional party -- the Party of the South -- and even there, they lost incumbents and vast amounts of their support. They have pandered to such a small and deranged band of extremists for so long, and they are now finally paying the price in the form of a disintegrating movement and continuously shrinking band of followers.

(4) The notion that this is a victory for some sort of mealy-mouthed, Bush-lite, glorified centrism is absurd on its face. Democrats won by aggressively attacking the Bush movement, not by trying to be a slightly modified and duller version of it. The accommodationist tack is what they attempted in 2002 and 2004 when they were crushed. They won in this election by making their opposition clear and assertive .

Many of the Democrats who won were exactly those candidates who were supported most enthusiastically by the most liberal blogs. Atrios, for instance, raised money for only a handful of challengers and many of them won -- against Republican incumbents in previously red districts: Jon Tester, Patrick Murphy, Joe Sestak, Nick Lampson, Chris Carney. The same is true for the FDL/C&L list of candidates (Amy Klobuchar, Ben Cardin, Sherood Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand) and the Daily Kos/MyDD list (Jim Webb, Tim Walz).

Liberal blogs tend to support underdog Democratic candidates who are challenging Republican incumbents or open seats, i.e. , the races that are most difficult to win. And yet a huge bulk of the winning Democratic candidates who won in those races were the ones supported by liberal blogs. And many blog-favored Democrats who lost were ones running in very red districts against GOP incumbents -- such as Angie Paccione (against the heinous Marilyn Musgrave) and Victoria Wulslin (against the equally horrible Jean Schmidt) -- and they came very close to winning.

Given those facts, the idea that this was some great repudiation of the blog-wing of the Democratic Party or that it was an endorsement of Broder-like, plodding centrism is purely wishful thinking on the part of those who wish it were so. The Democrats who won have one thing in common -- aggressive and unapologetic opposition to what the Republicans have become.

(5) The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists -- well-intentioned though they may be -- need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one's beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn't be replicated).

Karl Rove isn't all-powerful; today, he is a rejected loser. Republicans don't possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can't magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don't have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their "San Francisco values" and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody).

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious -- a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games -- can all be overcome. They just were.

Bush opponents haven't been losing because the deck is hopelessly stacked against them. They were losing because they hadn't figured out a way to convey to their fellow citizens just how radical and dangerous this political movement has become. Now they did, and as a result, Americans see this movement for what it is and have begun the process of smashing it.

(6) This is only one small step towards the restoration of our country and its defining values, not a magic bullet. There is much work to be done, accountability to be imposed, facts to be uncovered, radicalism to be reversed, damage to be undone, and the rule of law to be re-established. And none of that will be easy.

Even Democratic control of both the House and Senate is no guarantee that the abuses will end. Quite the contrary. It is worth recalling that the central premise of this President is the Irrelevance of Congress and of everything else other than his will and his power. Takeover of the houses of Congress and the end of one-party rule is but one weapon to be used in the ongoing fight. It is not the end of the fight. Far, far from it.

But if nothing else, yesterday's results should galvanize everyone who recognizes the danger this country has been placed in by the radical, hate-mongering, deeply corrupt authoritarians who have been controlling (and destroying) it. That movement has been severely wounded, but not yet killed.


9. Gifts From 2006 to the Next Election: YouTube, etc. – by BILL MARSH/NY Times

You may have noticed, in recent months, politicians trying to get your attention. You, the electoral lab rat, may also have noticed a few innovations in campaign tactics. Internet videos were popular enough to affect races; meanwhile, time-tested methods reached new heights. All are sure to be refined for the 2008 campaign, which is due to begin, oh, right about now. Here is a review.

Gaffes + YouTube = Gotcha

It used to be that once the klieg lights went out and the microphones were turned off a candidate could relax a bit, assuming she made it through the debate or the press conference without committing a major blooper.

No more. Now every public moment — and some private — is potential fodder for YouTube, the brutally efficient distributor of political gaffes caught on video.

One clip that may have tipped the scales: Sue Kelly, a Republican representative north of New York City, ran away from a local television crew as she was asked about her connection to the Congressional page scandal. (She was chairwoman in charge of House pages in 1999 and 2000.)

The encounter made it to YouTube and was viewed tens of thousands of times. Ms. Kelly lost her seat in a close race with John Hall, formerly of the band Orleans.

Michele Bachmann is another Republican with a catalogue of YouTube clips, and they weren’t posted by her. An opposition blogger put up videos of Ms. Bachmann addressing a church group, in which she discusses how she submits to her husband’s wishes and calls herself “hot” for Jesus Christ. They may have helped: she won her election in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District by about 8 percentage points.

The Polling Police

With the national voting apparatus still a patchwork of sometimes balky technologies, bloggers and videographers
emerged in large numbers to shine a light on problems at the ballot box as quickly as possible. Right-leaning Redstate.com reported alleged intimidation of poll-watchers in Philadelphia, where Rick Santorum, the Republican senator, needed every vote he could get. “Video the Vote,” a coalition of left-leaning groups, urged anyone with a camera to “stop voter suppression” by posting alleged irregularities on YouTube.

Loaded Links

You search Google for information about a candidate, by his name. High on the list are links to negative articles about him. That's because he's been "link bombed" — his opponents have engineered a flood of Web links and cross-links to unfavorable content, which then muscles its way up the search rankings. Left-wing bloggers went after about 50 Republicans this way. Look for more of the same against both sides.

Robocalls on the March

Election-season dinner conversation seems doomed to interruption by automated phone calls, a feature of political campaigns for many years now. But 2006 saw a major push by Republicans to use telemarketing methods normally used to sell consumer products.

Proponents say the calls serve as voter education. The objects of their efforts — Democrats — saw "gutter politics," in the words of Benjamin L. Cardin, the Maryland Senate candidate.

The automated, interactive calls ask pointed questions on campaign issues. If those on the other end of the line indicate that they agree, they then learn that their local Democrat feels otherwise, presumably leading them to vote for the G.O.P. The effort was criticized as an update of the push poll, an old tactic used by campaigns of many stripes: callers (humans) say they're conducting a public opinion survey, then ask loaded questions that push voters to specific candidates.

The effectiveness of the souped-up robocalls is open to debate. They were intended to help Senate candidates in Montana and Maryland, who lost, and another in Tennessee, who won. But they seem likely to recur because they're cheap. One call costs about 10 to 15 cents, a fraction of those placed by humans.

Humor Amid the Attacks

Fusty politicians are getting feisty, at least in their commercials. With a large subset of voters getting their news from "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," The Onion and other wiseacre sources, candidates are trying to join in the fun (when they're not busy eviscerating their opponents). A commercial for Jon Tester, the Democratic victor in the Montana Senate race, showed supporters young and old getting shorn in the Tester fashion, a flat-top buzz cut.

Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, played a sheriff in his own 30-second western. Not everyone laughed at the cheeky take-down of Harold Ford Jr., the Tennessee Democrat running for the Senate. The Republican National Committee sponsored the spot, which featured actors as unsavory Ford supporters, including a winking comehither blonde. The ad was denounced even by Mr. Ford's opponent, who went on to win the contest.