WP,pg1: A Voter Rebuke For Bush, the War And the Right

[DeepModem Mom]

A Voter Rebuke For Bush, the War And the Right
By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 8, 2006; Page A01


After voting in Crawford, Tex., President Bush returns to the White House. The GOP tried to avoid making the midterm elections a referendum on national leadership. (By Chip Somodevilla -- Getty Images)

The political pendulum in American politics swung away from the right yesterday, putting an end to the 12-year Republican Revolution on Capitol Hill and delivering a sharp rebuke of President Bush and the Iraq war.

The GOP reign in the House that began with Newt Gingrich in a burst of vision and confrontation in 1994 came crashing down amid voter disaffection with congressional corruption. The collapse of one-party rule in Washington will transform Bush's final two years in office and challenge Democrats to make the leap from angry opposition to partners in power....

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The Democrats' return to power in at least one house and gains in the other mean Bush will almost certainly face powerful pressure to reassess his Iraq policy -- not just from Democrats but from within his own party. Even many Republicans hanging on last night emerged from a bruising election restive and looking for a fresh direction....

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The results represented the first defeat at the polls for Bush politics since he came to power after the 2000 presidential election ended with a recount battle. In back-to-back elections after that, he defied conventional wisdom to pull out victories, tapping into a strain of anxiety that has flavored the national electorate since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001....Bush and senior adviser Karl Rove tried to replicate that strategy this fall, hoping to keep the election from becoming a referendum on the president's leadership and instead make it a choice between two parties with different governing philosophies...

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...there is a chance the 110th Congress could begin on a bipartisan note. Democrats have vowed to move quickly to tighten ethics laws and require offsets for new spending -- two plans many Republicans will probably support in light of yesterday's results....Partisan standoffs are likely over the war and any Democratic efforts to repeal Bush's tax cuts for upper-income America....At the center of all this will be Bush, who enters the final phase of his presidency with an opposition House and the sting of a campaign in which he was deemed to be an albatross....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701697.html