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We've Cleaned House Susan Estrich Iraq. Iraq. Iraq. And corruption and hypocrisy. That's why the Democrats won. All politics is not always local. Sometimes it's national. This wasn't just a vote on members of Congress, or even on Mr. Bush, but also on his war policy. And the outcome does not depend on the recount, if any, in Virginia. Oh, yes, and everyone who was tainted by corruption also lost. All of Jack Abramoff's buddies went down. Why shouldn't they? People are not stupid. Why do politicians keep forgetting that? I was on television last night with one conservative commentator who said he hoped the president would take last night's defeat as an occasion to re-evaluate his Iraq war effort (so far so good) and send more troops to Iraq, and then reach out to moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden and make clear that he is open to any solutions they might come up with. All we need is a few new ideas . . . Story Continues Below
This election was not a mandate to send more troops or go looking for new ideas. Isn't it a little late for that?
It was not a mandate to stay the course, finish the job, complete the mission, or enforce the Bush doctrine in Iraq.
The mandate was to come up with a plan to bring our troops home.
And clean up the House. The vote was a rejection of the president's war effort. That means more than Donald Rumsfeld's "fresh eyes." It means more than replacing Rummy. Changing deck chairs on the Titanic will not do the job. If the lesson of Vietnam was that a war cannot be sustained without public support, how can this war be sustained? If that wasn't the lesson, what was? If John Kerry wasn't so tarnished, he might be able to point it out. But he is. Even in an excellent wave, there are casualties; in this one, he was the Democrat who got destroyed. Does he know yet? Who will tell the candidate? Candidates and would-be candidates tend to live in bubbles surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear — yes-men and women is what they are, and visiting yes-men — which is the easiest thing to say anyway. A Democratic House cannot force the president to end the war, at least not without doing the kind of harm to the troops that they would not do. But they can certainly keep the focus there, particularly with presidential politics looming in the background. With the nominations of both parties up for grabs (no incumbent, no vice president), people are going to pay attention to the machinations between Congress and the president for only so long, which is to say, not very long. If the president doesn't start moving decisively on the war during that period, it is all you will hear about during the long presidential campaign, which is about to begin. Can we realistically expect that if you count 2-plus million votes twice you're going to get the same number? No, of course not. You're going to make mistakes both times. The point of counting, dare I suggest, is not perfect accuracy, which is an impossible goal, just as it is in a trial where a man's life may be hanging in the balance. You want the process by which the votes are counted to be fair, free of any intentional discrimination — a process where there is no intentional effort to weigh certain votes of one group differently than others, no systemic bias in the counting. But if the system of counting is fair, has been done fairly, why don't we say, as we do in criminal cases, that it's the process that should be fair? And if the process is fair, why should the result not be? Radical, yes?
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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