Warham
11-10-2006, 03:37 PM
THE result of US midterm congressional elections contains two great lessons, one for liberals and Democrats and one for conservatives and Republicans.
For liberals: the US remains extremely conservative. In a year many called "the worst Republican environment since Watergate", the party lost fewer than half as many seats as the Democrats lost in 1994. Control of the Senate is now in Democrat hands.
Previous Democratic wins - 1974, 1986 - swept into office new and very liberal politicians. The House class of 2006, by contrast, will be strikingly less liberal than the existing Democrat caucus.
The Democrats' (unsuccessful) Senate candidate in Tennessee, Harold Ford, described God as his campaign manager and posted the Ten Commandments on the back of his business cards.
The US, in short, has experienced a sharp partisan tilt - but not nearly so sharp an ideological change. Polls continue to show that somewhere between 45 and 55 per cent of Americans would favour a military strike on Iran if diplomacy fails to halt its nuclear program. Frustration in Iraq is not leading them to reconsider the war on Islamic extremism. Indeed, many polls suggest they are becoming more radical in their attitudes to Islam: the proportion of Americans who associate Islam with terrorism did not rise at all after the September 11 attacks, but has risen since the Danish cartoon controversy.
The lessons on the other side of the political ledger are equally important - and possibly even more painful. Not only has President George Bush been forced at last to cashier his Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, but he has replaced him with Bob Gates, a former CIA director who was one of the intimates of the first president Bush. Along with the isolation of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, it marks an embarrassing reversal for the President.
Exit polls suggest that corruption, not Iraq, ranked first among voter concerns. But the corruption of the Republican Party went much deeper than a couple of congressmen accepting gifts from Jack Abramoff and his fellow lobbyists. The deeper problem was that people such as Abramoff were able to buy attention for issues and causes rejected by most Americans.
The most extreme example of this phenomenon was the Bush Administration's push for an immigration reform that combined amnesty in all but name for most of the 12 million illegal aliens with a guest-worker program to import many million more low-skilled, low-wage workers.
Republicans and conservatives hate the measure. Yet Bush and the Senate Republicans have pushed for it again and again.
Since inauguration day, Bush's support among conservative Republicans has dropped by more than 20 percentage points, from the high 90s to the mid 70s. If Democrats can manoeuvre him into fighting his party on immigration, they can isolate him.
Many in Europe perceive Bush as a right-wing extremist. If he were, he would be in far less trouble today. In truth, his relationship with conservative America (36 per cent of the electorate - double the portion that calls itself liberal) has always been tense and complicated.
Yet at exactly the moment that conservative Republicans yearn to hear a reassertion of their principles and ideals, they are likely to hear instead a command to fall back into formation for one last grand charge on behalf of an immigration policy demanded by the party's donors, not its voters.
And if Bush pursues it, it is precisely the kind of action that will transform Tuesday's defeat into a two-year-long rout.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/a-partisan-tilt-but-no-ideological-change/2006/11/10/1162661897739.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
For liberals: the US remains extremely conservative. In a year many called "the worst Republican environment since Watergate", the party lost fewer than half as many seats as the Democrats lost in 1994. Control of the Senate is now in Democrat hands.
Previous Democratic wins - 1974, 1986 - swept into office new and very liberal politicians. The House class of 2006, by contrast, will be strikingly less liberal than the existing Democrat caucus.
The Democrats' (unsuccessful) Senate candidate in Tennessee, Harold Ford, described God as his campaign manager and posted the Ten Commandments on the back of his business cards.
The US, in short, has experienced a sharp partisan tilt - but not nearly so sharp an ideological change. Polls continue to show that somewhere between 45 and 55 per cent of Americans would favour a military strike on Iran if diplomacy fails to halt its nuclear program. Frustration in Iraq is not leading them to reconsider the war on Islamic extremism. Indeed, many polls suggest they are becoming more radical in their attitudes to Islam: the proportion of Americans who associate Islam with terrorism did not rise at all after the September 11 attacks, but has risen since the Danish cartoon controversy.
The lessons on the other side of the political ledger are equally important - and possibly even more painful. Not only has President George Bush been forced at last to cashier his Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, but he has replaced him with Bob Gates, a former CIA director who was one of the intimates of the first president Bush. Along with the isolation of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, it marks an embarrassing reversal for the President.
Exit polls suggest that corruption, not Iraq, ranked first among voter concerns. But the corruption of the Republican Party went much deeper than a couple of congressmen accepting gifts from Jack Abramoff and his fellow lobbyists. The deeper problem was that people such as Abramoff were able to buy attention for issues and causes rejected by most Americans.
The most extreme example of this phenomenon was the Bush Administration's push for an immigration reform that combined amnesty in all but name for most of the 12 million illegal aliens with a guest-worker program to import many million more low-skilled, low-wage workers.
Republicans and conservatives hate the measure. Yet Bush and the Senate Republicans have pushed for it again and again.
Since inauguration day, Bush's support among conservative Republicans has dropped by more than 20 percentage points, from the high 90s to the mid 70s. If Democrats can manoeuvre him into fighting his party on immigration, they can isolate him.
Many in Europe perceive Bush as a right-wing extremist. If he were, he would be in far less trouble today. In truth, his relationship with conservative America (36 per cent of the electorate - double the portion that calls itself liberal) has always been tense and complicated.
Yet at exactly the moment that conservative Republicans yearn to hear a reassertion of their principles and ideals, they are likely to hear instead a command to fall back into formation for one last grand charge on behalf of an immigration policy demanded by the party's donors, not its voters.
And if Bush pursues it, it is precisely the kind of action that will transform Tuesday's defeat into a two-year-long rout.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/a-partisan-tilt-but-no-ideological-change/2006/11/10/1162661897739.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1