Bush minus

Published : Dec 01, 2006 00:00 IST

President George Bush walks away after a news conference at the White House on November 8. - KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

President George Bush walks away after a news conference at the White House on November 8. - KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

The Republicans suffer spectacular reverses in the U.S. congressional elections owing mostly to the Iraq policy and to economic downslide.

KARL ROVE, President George W. Bush's political guru, needs to re-learn his mathematics. A week before the 2006 midterm elections in the United States, National Public Radio's Robert Seigel interviewed him about his party's chances. Rove said he had studied 68 separate polls, which he claimed, "added up to a Republican Senate and Republican House". "You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math," Rove said, "and I'm entitled to THE math." When Robert Seigel interjected, "I don't know if we're entitled to a different math but your... ," Rove cut him off, "I said THE math."

On the night of November 7, the U.S. electorate delivered THE math. Across the country, from rural to urban districts, in red and blue States, the Democratic Party defeated the Republican Party and took control of the two legislative houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

In the Senate, the "upper house", the Democrats and the Republicans won 49 seats each, but two independents extended their support to the party of liberalism. This is a net six-seat gain by the Democrats. In the House, the Democrats reversed a 30-seat deficit into a 33-seat advantage.

Now, at least one of the three pillars of the U.S. government is out of the hands of the Bush team, and of the Conservatives. The presidency will continue with Bush until 2008, and the judiciary has a comfortable Conservative majority until at least two Justices decide to retire. This is not a wholesale defeat for the Right as much as it has dented the one-party hold over the machinery of the U.S. government.

The New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks took a much stronger position. "It's clear that this election will mark the end of Conservative dominance," he wrote before the ballots were cast. "This election is a period, not a comma, in political history."

The day after the election, Bush held one of his infrequent press conferences. As he walked before the journalists, he quipped, "Why all the glum faces?" Then, chagrined, he noted that the "the message was clear. The American people want their leaders in Washington to set aside partisan differences, conduct ourselves in an ethical manner, and work together to address the challenges facing our nation."

Talk of bipartisanship, absent in Washington since the start of the Bush presidency, is an indication of the seriousness with which the White House has taken this blow. In December 2000, as Bush got ready to enter the White House, the right-wing journal edited by William S. Buckley, National Review, pushed for a robust "Conservative bipartisanship", where the Republicans would drive an agenda and draw Democratic votes to their side; there would be no accession to any liberal issues. "Bipartisanship", in this worldview, meant that the Republicans would simply get their way with Democratic support. The times have now changed.

The new crop of populist Democrats who won election to Congress in 2006 appear less willing to give in to pressure from the White House. During a debate prior to the elections, Jon Tester of Montana, who eventually beat a Republican Senator, was asked about the Patriot Act, the Bill that allows the U.S. government to intrude into the privacy of its residents. For example, the Bill allows "sneak and peek" searches, where the government can use a surreptitious warrant to investigate the habits and property of a citizen. The Republican incumbent, perhaps assuming that Tester was like the many Democrats who accede to its broad provisions, accused Tester of wanting to "weaken the Patriot Act". Tester leaned into his microphone: "Let me be clear. I don't want to weaken the Patriot Act. I want to repeal it." Such determination within the Senate will weaken the accommodative tendencies within the Democratic caucus.

Bush has his work cut out for him. Compromise is unpalatable to Bush, which is why, perhaps, he couched his pledge to work with the Democrats in a joke. "And in my first act of bipartisan outreach since the election, I shared with [presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] the names of some Republican interior decorators who can help her pick out the new drapes in her new offices." Pelosi, who is a veteran politician with a strong liberal record, will be the first woman to hold the Speaker's gavel. Bush's casual sexist dismissal of Pelosi (with the comment about the drapes) is indicative not only of his machismo, but also of his discomfort that he must cooperate with a powerful woman.

Anti-war sentiment is high in the U.S. The barometer of this dissent is not in the frequency of protest marches or in silent vigils. These happen, but are sparsely attended. Polls provide a valuable test of how people think, even if there are few avenues for these opinions to find public expression. A CNN poll a few days before the elections found that 61 per cent of the population opposed the Iraq war (in January the figure stood at 53 per cent). Public dissatisfaction with the war is matched by a steep decline in the public's faith in Bush (whose job approval rating stands at a minuscule 32 per cent).

A little more than a third of the voters pulled the Democratic lever to send a message to Bush for his Iraq policy, while 67 per cent felt that the Iraq war strongly influenced their calculations in the polling booth. Nancy Pelosi's victory rally stressed this theme. "Stay the course has not made our country safer, has not honoured our commitment to our troops and has not made the region more stable," the Democrat said. "We cannot continue down this catastrophic path. We say to the President, `Mr. President, we need a new direction in Iraq'."

For some months now, Bush has recognised that there is little political will to continue with Project Iraq. In a press conference on October 11, he drew back from his phrase "stay the course". "Stay the course," he said, "means keep doing what you're doing. My attitude is, don't do what you're doing if it's not working; change."

But what must change? The easiest way to deliver the perception of change is to rearrange the furniture in the Cabinet. Bush frequently defended his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld but Democrats, some Republicans and many members of the U.S. military called for his departure.

The first blow came in the third volume of journalist Bob Woodward's trilogy on the Bush administration and the war on terror. In State of Denial, Woodward offers a July 2005 memorandum from Steve Herbits, an adviser to Rumsfeld, which pointed out that the Secretary is "indecisive, contrary to popular image. Would not accept that some people in some areas are smarter than he. Arrogant. Trusts very few people." A few days before the election, Army Times ran an editorial with the headline, "Time for Rumsfeld to Go."

During his day-after press conference, Bush fired Rumsfeld and welcomed his father's confidant, Robert Gates (formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency) to be the new Defence Secretary. The Iraq war had its scapegoat. The Bush team hoped that Rumsfeld's departure would satisfy the Democrats and allow the administration a second wind to prosecute its war.

Even as the Democratic leader Howard Dean mumbled, "We can't leave Iraq now. We need to stabilise the situation," others called for much more urgent action. Pelosi told Time that she would like to see at least 30,000 troops withdrawn in a year. "They are viewed as an occupation force. Our presence there is a magnet for terrorists." To facilitate this, two senior Democratic Senators intend to table a resolution in January that calls for a phased redeployment of U.S. forces within four to six months.

The election victory means that the Democrats control all the committees that have oversight over the executive branch. Bush will have to come hat in hand to the Democrats to increase funds for his Iraq adventure. The Democratic leaders of the Appropriations Committee, who hold the purse strings for the government, in both the House (David Obey of Wisconsin) and the Senate (Robert Byrd of West Virginia) voted against the Iraq war in 2002. They will be staunch critics of any increase in the war effort. The war has already cost $378 billion (until the end of the first half of 2007), and Bush will require at least $100 billion more to sustain the occupation while he is President.

But this is the least of Bush's problems. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles just won a 16th term to the House of Representatives. He is slated to chair the Government Reform Committee, whose ambit is to investigate any government programme. Waxman has been an invaluable accumulator of facts on various scandals, whether Enron, contract abuses in Iraq or the politicisation of science funding. While in the minority, Waxman collated reports on U.S. funds in Iraq, where he alleges about $45 billion of the $80 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been lost to fraud or waste. "I'm going to have an interesting time," Waxman said of being the chairman of the Committee three days after the election. There are so many issues that require investigation. "The most difficult thing will be to pick and choose."

Waxman is not the lone sentry standing guard against corruption. Two-thirds of those who voted against Bush's party said that the Iraq war was an "extremely" important issue for them, but 74 per cent pointed to corruption and 82 per cent worried about the state of the economy. While this election was about Iraq, it was also about the direction of the Bush agenda and the character of its personnel.

Corruption scandals wrack the administration, particularly a host of them that swirl around a single lobbyist (indicted high-roller Jack Abramoff, who brought down Republican leader Tom DeLay of Texas). Republican Randy Cunningham went to jail in March for taking $2.4 million in bribes to facilitate arms contractors. Republicans in Ohio fell prey to a series of scandals driven by the Republican Governor Bob Taft.

The party is now associated less with probity and more with sleaze. A Pew poll from August 2006 showed that three quarters of the electorate felt that more rules needed to be in place as a check against corporate power over government. A small minority believed that the Democrats were more honest and ethical than the Republicans, although a very large minority (23 per cent) told the Pew researchers that neither party was capable of real honesty.

The Democratic leadership tried its best to tone down any shrill anti-war or anti-corporate candidates. But the candidates favoured by the Democratic establishment did not fare well on election day. Those who went with their gut, and spoke candidly about the quagmire in Iraq and the stalled U.S. economy, won by decent margins. For the Senate, Jim Webb of Virginia and Tester of Montana both won narrow victories in conservative States largely because of their principled position against the war.

But both Tester and Webb are also angered by the haemorrhaged U.S. economy. Since 2000, when Bush took office, the U.S. has lost over three million industrial jobs. This summer, former Federal Reserve Vice-Chairman Alan Blinder wrote in Foreign Affairs that as a result of globalisation and free trade policies, 42 to 56 million U.S. service sector jobs were vulnerable. With this sort of jobs climate, and with the collapse of hope among large sections of the U.S. middle and working class, the populist rhetoric of little-regarded Democratic challengers carried the day. New Hampshire's Carol Shea-Porter, for instance, dismissed talk of job growth. "My voters understand that those were Wal-Mart jobs," she said. "They understood when they talked about the stock market boom that half of Americans aren't even in the stock market."

The normally collegial Senate has two new members who will also unfurl the banner of peace and jobs. One of them, Bernie Sanders, won a landslide from Vermont. Sanders, who was once a popular Mayor and has since been in the House of Representatives, is a socialist. After his election he thundered, "I believe that the right-wing extremist policy is dead in America. That is a big deal." The first socialist in the Senate, Sanders wants to turn the body to the "needs of the middle classes and working families". Another rabble-rouser, the soft-spoken baseball lover Sherrod Brown, will join him. Brown, who represents the rust-belt State of Ohio, is the author of The Myth of Free Trade, a book that traces the social costs borne by the planet's working class for the North American Free Trade Agreement and other such treaties.

"An unregulated global economy," Brown wrote, "is a threat to all of us," whether it is the "child in Avon Lake, Ohio, who eats raspberries grown in Guatemala by poorly paid farmers who use pesticides banned in the United States" or else the "Chinese prison camp labourer". Brown is an advocate of fair trade and of union rights (his daughter is a union organiser).

Sanders and Brown are not alone. Organic farmer Tester beat out 18-year incumbent Conrad Burns. Tester ran a campaign rooted in his own experience as a farmer. Corporate power, and its free trade agenda, Tester pointed out during the campaign, "puts our jobs and the viability of family farms and ranches across Montana in jeopardy by handing off trade advantage to foreign interests".

Tester speaks for the "regular folks" who, he says, "hasn't been given much of a shake." If Tester comes with impeccable working class credentials, another Democratic winner, Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, is a blueblood (his father was the Governor of the State). Casey also opposes pro-corporate globalisation, of the variety pushed by both Bush and Clinton. "You have to stare in the face of the folks you represent," said this career lawyer. "I couldn't see my way past the economic misery my district has suffered these last 15 years to inflict more."

The sweep of Congress is not an isolated phenomenon. More ominous to the Republicans is the changes closer to the grassroots. In the State legislatures, more than 275 seats and 10 legislative chambers changed hands. Democrats now control both the legislative and executive branches in 15 States. These gains took place across the country. Even 30 per cent of the evangelical voters, who gave Bush the election in 2004, voted for the Democrats. They eschewed a "values" agenda restricted to God, gays and guns and opted for a "values" agenda that ensures the dignity of working-class and middle-class people and their right to hold meaningful jobs, to live without fear of war and conscription, and to live with a safety net in times of flood or famine.

Neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer conceded that the voters rejected the Republican agenda. "The election will be a referendum of sorts on Iraq," he wrote on the eve of the elections. "But it will be registering nothing more than uneasiness and discontent. Had the Democrats offered a coherent alternative to the current policy, one could draw lessons as to what course the country should take."

This applies both to the question of Iraq and to that of corporate power. On both scores the Democratic leadership has been able to galvanise the grievances of the population, and on both the leadership holds views that do not differentiate them too much from the Bush agenda.

If Sherrod Brown were to set the terms for the Democratic Party, on the other hand, the fruits of this election might be different. In his book, Brown writes, "It has been a hundred-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us. We took on oil and chemical companies to enact clean air and safe drinking water laws. We fought off Wall Street bankers to create social security. We battled entrenched business interests to enact women's and civil rights, protections for the disabled and prohibitions on child labour. We fought for all of it. Every bit of progress made in the struggle for economic and social justice came over the opposition of society's most privileged and most powerful."

The struggle to define the election and the next two years has begun in Washington. Bush wants to hand over the Iraq problem to the Democratic Congress and let it be responsible for either a withdrawal or a policy failure. If the Democrats are in charge of a messy withdrawal in Iraq, Bush and the Republicans hope that this will obscure their role in getting the U.S. involved in this war of choice in the first place. Pelosi will have new drapes in her office, but more importantly she will bring a shrewd political acumen into the halls of Congress. For all that, it is not yet curtains for the Bush agenda.

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