Ledeen:

I think Mark Steyn sums it up well: this was a normal 6th year election, not a paradigm shift. narrow margins in both houses of Congress, and we’re back to divided government. I think the left’s pickups were basically due to disenchantment with Bush and the state of the war in Iraq. In retrospect, isn’t it fair to say that Bush’s reelection and the Congressional results in ’04 were basically a message to him? Get Iraq right, you’ve got two years or else. And he hasn’t got Iraq right, so the “or else” arrived as threatened. Indeed, as others politically more savvy than I have pointed out, lots of the Blue pickups in the House were accomplished by blue-dog Dems.

Many of those approving the 2002 Congressional war resolution did so under duress. That is not to minimize that they did in fact sign on to the war, but rather to explain that those prosecuting the war ought to have realized they had a very brief window of opporuntity to emerge with a glorious victory. Insincere signatures on a piece of paper fade to invisible ink, absent decisive, and above all, swift, victory. Michael Ledeen says that the Bush administration got one last chance to learn that lesson from the election of 2004. They did not. There is a lesson of enormous importance, and one in fact that America has had the opportunity to learn multiple times since 1945.

UPDATE

Novak amplifies the theme:

Republican leaders are still in denial in the wake of their crushing defeat. They blame individual losing candidates for failing to prepare themselves for the election. In contrast, the private reaction by the candidates was anger at President Bush and his political team. That includes a rising GOP undercurrent against Iraq policy. The unpleasant truth is that Republicans lost almost everywhere the president campaigned during the past week. An exception was Florida, where State Attorney General Charlie Crist kept out of Bush’s way and won the election for governor.

The bellwether of defeats to come was the Louisville, Ky., district where the respected Rep. Anne Northrup, who won 60 percent of the vote two years ago, was defeated for a sixth term. There was nothing she had done wrong or that her opponent had done right to cause her defeat. The same was true of other highly regarded Republican congressional veterans who were defeated Tuesday, headed by Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, Clay Shaw of Florida and Jim Leach of Iowa.

Exit polls confirmed what had been clear to anyone who spent any time on the campaign circuit this year. Opposition to the war and the president had produced a virulent anti-Republican mood. About two weeks before the election, political technicians running the campaign of Rep. Charles Bass in New Hampshire suddenly realized that the popular six-termer was in deep trouble. His moderate voting and record of pork-delivery (including a federal prison for his district) meant nothing. He was swept under by the anti-Iraq voting tide. Bass at least had some warning. New Hampshire’s other House member, Rep. Jeb Bradley, won with 63 percent of the vote in 2004 and never felt threatened this year until the results came in. This was a nationalized election about Iraq where individual characteristics did not count.

“Defeat” is not the only orphan; indecision, delay, and political correctness in war are orphans too.

UPDATE II

George Will piles on, echoing the same theme we have identified:

Republicans sank beneath the weight of Iraq, the lesson of which is patent: Wars of choice should be won swiftly rather than lost protractedly.

On election eve the president, perhaps thinking one should not tinker with success, promised that his secretary of defense would remain. That promise perished Wednesday as a result of Tuesday’s repudiation of Republican stewardship which, although emphatic, was not inordinate, considering the offense that provoked it — war leadership even worse than during the War of 1812. Tuesday’s House result — the end of 12 years of Republican control — was normal; the reason for it was unprecedented. The Democrats’ 40 years of control of the House before 1994 was aberrant: In the 140 years since 1866, the first post-Civil War election, party control of the House has now changed 15 times — an average of once every 9.3 years. But never before has a midterm election so severely repudiated a president for a single policy. The Iraq War, like the Alaska bridge, pungently proclaims how Republicans earned their rebuke. They are guilty of apostasy from conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embrace of anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building grandiosity pursued incompetently).

Forcing the Democrats to sign on to the 2002 Iraq War Resolution was a clever bit of parliamentary chicanery in the tradition of Tiberius Gracchus over two millennia ago towards the end of the Roman Republic. Clever tricks have their place, of course, but those perpetrating them often come to a bad end unless they have the means and the will to follow them up. This is perhaps particularly true in matters of war. Running the second politically correct war in two generations has led to grim electoral defeat for the President’s party in the minds of serious commentators from his own party.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Polling, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.