Rumsfeld departure clouds Iraq plans; Bush faces challenge
By Jackie Calmes And David Rogers
With Democrats gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives and coming tantalizingly close to taking the Senate, Washington is heading into a new era of divided government, with Democrats more empowered than they have been in years.
That sets the stage for a momentous challenge for President George W. Bush. In the final two years of his presidency, will he suddenly change his one-party governing style to reach out to Democrats? And will they in turn reach accommodations with the president and avoid stalemates in Washington?
Yesterday Mr. Bush announced that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a lightning rod for criticism about the war in Iraq, will step down.
The new Washington power arrangement seems likely to have big ripple effects, for economic policy, business policy and on the foreign-policy question that dominated the campaign and shaped the outcome?Iraq.
A Republican-dominated Washington has been good to business in particular. President Bush and his allies in Congress have enacted extensive tax cuts, including breaks on dividends, capital gains and estates. They have scaled back environmental and other regulations. They have promoted free-trade agreements.
In a more divided Washington?driven more by Democrats?that environment would likely change. Prospects for extending the Bush tax cuts beyond the 2010 expiration would diminish, particularly for breaks on investments, and for upper-income families. The outlook would dim for extending the president’s authority to negotiate new trade deals, which is set to expire next year.
Democrats will push hard for a number of measures businesses have long resisted. President Bush and congressional Republicans will be able to block many of them. Still, there are a number of policies where some Republicans, having survived a near-death experience at the polls, may form a working bipartisan majority. In a campaign marked by populist economic rhetoric, that could include a boost in the national minimum wage, some kind of reduction in tax breaks for oil companies, and changes to Medicare that would allow the federal government to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies.
In some areas, heightened Democratic power could be good for business. In one of the few rifts with their corporate backers, House Republicans this past year took a hard line on immigration, rejecting calls from companies to ease labor shortages by creating a guest-worker program. A larger Democratic bloc in Congress could make more possible the kind of compromise Mr. Bush himself has been seeking between more immigration and tougher enforcement.
That could be especially likely if, as exit polls suggest, Democrats made big gains with Hispanic voters on Tuesday. Those surveys showed Hispanics favoring Democrats over Republicans, 73% to 26%.
The Hispanic vote could prove to be one of the biggest factors of the 2006 campaign. Since his days as Texas governor, Mr. Bush and his political strategist, Karl Rove, had envisioned building a stronger long-term Republican coalition by adding Hispanics. The hard line by congressional Republicans on immigration may have damaged that goal.
Beyond potential cooperation on immigration, the partisan gulf could prove insurmountable on most everything else facing Washington, including Iraq and the question of whether to extend Mr. Bush’s tax cuts beyond their expiration at the end of the decade. Time is short, as politicians in both parties mobilize for the 2008 presidential election. Their debates, stoking divisions within and between the parties, soon could overwhelm any chance at compromise.
Just how much power Democrats actually will have hangs on the final Senate results.
By yesterday morning, Democrats had knocked off four Republican Senate incumbents, in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. In Montana, Democratic challenger Jon Tester squeaked out a victory over Republican Sen. Conrad Burns.
Virginia, however, seemed headed for a recount, and possibly messy legal fights. With practically all the votes counted, Democratic challenger Jim Webb held a narrow lead over Republican Sen. George Allen. The gap was less than 10,000 votes out of more than two million cast, a margin that could trigger an automatic review of the votes.
In the House, Democrats reclaimed more than two dozen seats by early yesterday morning?more than 15 they needed in the 435-member House of Representatives?giving them clear control of the chamber and likely elevating House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California to be the first female Speaker of the House. “Today we have made history. Now let us make progress,” Ms. Pelosi said at a rally yesterday.
Democrats picked up Republican-held House seats in the nation’s heartland?four in Indiana and Kentucky alone?and at least eight in the Northeast, as voters registered their discontent after six years of a Republican-led government and their concerns about the Iraq war. It was a bad day for Republican moderates, as Democrats defeated lawmakers such as Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Rep. Nancy Johnson of Connecticut and?in a surprise upset?15-term Iowa Rep. Jim Leach.
That feat was harder than it sounds because all but several dozen House districts are mapped in a way that favors one party or the other.
Yet the Republican wall of cleverly drawn districts wasn’t big enough to protect them from a wave of public dissatisfaction with the party. Scandal weighed heavily on Republicans, as they lost at least four seats in which the incumbents were tainted by allegations of wrongdoing. One of the biggest symbolic victories for Democrats was to capture the Texas district left vacant by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who quit Congress this year amid a scandal involving his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Mr. DeLay once had promised to make Republicans a “permanent majority” in Congress. In Florida, Democrat Tim Mahoney prevailed in his race against Republican state Rep. Joe Negron for the seat recently vacated by Rep. Mark Foley, whose name remained on the ballot under state election law even after he dropped out amid a scandal.
The Senate posed a higher hurdle for Democrats. They needed six seats to win control, combining Democrats with two friendly independents for an effective majority of 51 seats. With a 50-50split, Vice President Dick Cheney would break the tie in Republicans’ favor.
In addition to the Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Rhode Island gains, Democrats celebrated the victory in New Jersey of Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, making his first run for election since his appointment to the seat. That dashed Republicans’ best hope of snatching a Democratic seat.
The one Democratic loss was in Connecticut, where independent Joseph Lieberman retained his seat after losing the Democratic primary to an antiwar candidate. Still, he has said he would caucus with the Democrats, as will a newly elected independent, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
In poll after poll going into Election Day, voters vented their frustration with an increasingly unpopular president, the war in Iraq and a Republican-led Congress that hadn’t provided the checks and balances Americans seem to want.
More than half of voters surveyed said they disapproved of Congress’s handling of the scandal surrounding former Rep. Foley, and they went for the Democrats by a three-to-one margin. Republican leaders tried to cast the election more around local, not national, issues, but voters didn’t buy it. By nearly a two-to-one margin, they said national issues were more important in casting their ballot for the House.
The exit polls showed that terrorism and the war in Iraq were nearly equal in voters’ minds as important issues.
There were signs that Republicans’ hopes for a last-minute turn of public opinion in their favor were dashed. In the early exit polls, voters who said they made their choice for House elections in the past three days broke decidedly for Democrats.
While voters backed Democratic candidates, they also seemed to want the branches of their government to get along and tackle big problems. That isn’t out of the question: Divided governments of recent years have yielded some of Washington’s best-known achievements. Republican Ronald Reagan, working with a Democratic-led House, signed into law the landmark 1986 overhaul of the tax code. Democrat Bill Clinton worked with a Republican-led Congress in the mid-1990s to revamp welfare policies.
The question now for Mr. Bush is whether he can make the same sort of midcourse corrections. To date, as even Republicans privately acknowledge, he has shown little sign of that?despite the bipartisanship that had been a hallmark of his governorship in Texas in the 1990s.
To date, the president has been more responsive to his party’s ideologically conservative base. Many of those Republicans want him to be more confrontational?for example, by vetoing spending bills.
While the president wasn’t on Tuesday’s ballots, he was on many voters’ minds. The election shaped up as a referendum on Mr. Bush and what Democrats derided as “a rubber-stamp Republican Congress.”
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, hurt their cause by a series of corruption and personal scandals. Their own conservative base was fractured by opposition to high spending and inaction on a range of social issues and illegal immigration.
Republican candidates faced “the most difficult environment for Republicans since Watergate,” said party pollster Bill McInturff. The party’s candidates “were unable to shift the debate from the fatigue, concern and doubt voters express about the situation in Iraq.”
A senior White House official said Mr. Bush is ready to work closely with congressional Democrats.
“We will seek a broader consensus on Iraq, because the stakes are too high. And there are a series of issues here at home where greater consensus can be found,” the official said as voters went to the polls. He added, in a pointed warning to Democrats: “The question is whether both sides are willing to go halfway. I know we are. But are they?”
House Republicans faced a bloodletting in their leadership. That could affect Mr. Bush’s agenda. Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who has been Mr. Bush’s closest ally in Congress, is considered all but certain to lose power in the party. House Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri also could face challenges.
Patrick Burns, who works at a nonprofit group in Washington, said neighbors swamped his polling place in Arlington, Virginia, where the Senate race was intense. “I’ve been voting there for 10 years and this was the heaviest I’ve seen,” Mr. Burns said.
In some places, a desire for change seemed to drive turnout. In Brook Park, a small community adjacent to Cleveland, Kathleen Fromme, 46, a homemaker, said she was turned off by negative campaigning. “I’m sick of all the ads and all the negativity. It’s getting ridiculous,” she said. “I usually vote for [Sen. Mike] DeWine, but was on the fence this year,” she said. She wouldn’t dis-