So What Happened in the '06 Election? The DC Guy November 10, 2006

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Let me get this out of the way: my election predictions were wrong. Obviously I was being far more optimistic than I should have been. To a certain extent I'm angry at myself for falling pray to the most dangerous thing that can happen to anyone in this town - I drank the "kool-aid". Now that the election is over and I've had time to reflect, my anger has moved in a different direction.

The more I think about it, the more it seems obvious to me that this election never had to happen this way. The day after the election, President Bush accepted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. This was stunning news, coming so close on the heals of his claims that Rumsfeld would have a job through the end of his Presidency. The President made that statement less than two weeks before the election. And the day after, Rumsfeld was gone. Before a single oversight committee hearing, before a single call for his resignation from the newly minted Democratic Speaker or Democratic Majority Leader.

If Bush was willing to fire Rumsfeld if the Democrats won, why wasn't he willing to fire Rumsfeld a few months ago to keep the Democrats from winning?

The American people have been clamoring for a change in strategy in Iraq for almost a year. The most visible means of demosntrating that we are changing our strategy would have been to put a new face at the head of the Defense Department. I am confident that Bush would have seen an immediate double digit bump in his approval ratings if he had fired Rumsfeld a few months before the election. That's all that would have been necessary. But he didn't. And his unwillingness contributed to the Republicans losing on election day. It is a mystery as to why the political shop in the White House couldn't see this.

While I continue to support the President, the more I think about it, the more I think that this defeat was directly attributable to mistakes that were made long before the election by the President himself. I think the seeds of the Republican defeat went back to 2004 directly following the election. The President made the decision to try and "depoliticize" the Iraq War - and his main way of doing that was to effectively ignore it for almost a year. This gave the Democrats and the media a golden opportunity to frame the debate their way, and the used it. Bush effectively ceded the argument on the Iraq war to the Democrats. When they called the war unjustified, he didn't respond adequately. When they said the war was only about WMDs, he didn't respond adequately. When the casualties mounted, instead of being reminded of all the reasons why we were there that were still legitimate, all we heard was the Democrats demanding accountability.

Bush may have felt he was taking the high road by trying to depoliticize the war in Iraq, but in reality, all he did was give the Democrats the mike for over year. And the Republicans paid for it on November 7th.

The Democrats now have control of both the House and the Senate. It's their turn to drive the debate, and the Republicans can respond. Now both parties will have to shoulder the burden for the policies of the government, and I hope that this results in some positive change.

The President now has a choice to make - he can take the easy way out, like Bill Clinton did, and let the Democrats do the heavy lifting while he watches his approval rating go back up. Or, he can act like the George W. Bush of September 12, 2001, and he can keep fighting for what he knows is right, no matter how popular it is. We can only hope he chooses the latter.

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