Posted by
LisaM on Thursday, November 09, 2006 8:34:24 AM
So now you have it. The Democratic Party has taken not the 15 seats it needed for control of the House, but at least 26 in the midterm elections of 2006. Technically, the Senate is still up for grabs but the Democrats need only two more seats to win control of the Senate. The last two holdouts are Montana and Virginia with a Democratic win projected for Montana. The race between Senator George Allen (R-VA) and James Webb is terribly tight and could end up in a recount. If so, we won’t know if the Democrats control the Senate until after the recount which will happen November 27. Regardless, I strongly suspect I will be sending my petitions to Senator Webb.
The GOP expected to lose some seats in both Houses of Congress but it did not expect such wholesale rejection. Superficial punditry, such as that expressed in
Nov 8 New York Times editorial page, explains the turnover as “an angry shout of repudiation of the Bush White House and the abysmal way the Republican majority has run Congress. The Republicans,” the editorial rants, “created their defeat by focusing obsessively on the right-wing ‘base,’ ostracizing not only the Democrats but their own party’s more moderate legislators.” The dissatisfaction of many Americans with the Administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and the Congressional handling of high-stakes issues such as illegal immigration, social security and health care was the impetus for the decision of many voters to give the other side a chance. But the ways,or non-ways that the Republican Congress handled these issues is reflective of a deeper problem in the GOP. I believe the GOP got the boot not because of its “obsession with the right-wing base,” but because it disappointed this huge conservative constituency.
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