A View From Britain

Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph, takes a look at what the election was – and what it was not.

These elections clearly were a referendum on the Bush presidency, but they were about more than the conduct of the war.

The country was deeply disillusioned by the administration’s failures in handling the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, but it was probably angered as much by the collapse of promises on immigration and fiscal responsibility.

To the disgust of its traditional party base, the Bush White House spent money at record levels.

To the disappointment of its more radical supporters, it backed away from its major project to reform social security.

And perhaps most damagingly, it dithered over controlling illegal immigration.

So defending the war became the only story that Bush had to tell: his adherence to the Rumsfeld-Cheney strategy came to look like a pathological state of denial rather than courageous consistency.

But for all that, the Democratic victory was not as sweeping as it might have been.

The average number of net Congressional gains for the opposition party in a sixth-year election (half-way through a president’s second term) is around 31, and this result does not look much different from that.

And that is really the key here. There are a lot of different ideas on what went wrong, many different takes on it. But it actually was probably a bit of all of the reasons being put forward. There are a lot of disappointed people today. But the Democrats themselves are among them, I think. Because this could have been a landslide and it was not. They do not have a supermajority in either house. And a lot of their candidates had to run right or to the center to pull off the win.

Don't get me wrong, this was a bad election for the Republicans, but now the Democrats have to actually accomplish something other than criticize. Or their bad election will come in two years.