Day: November 9, 2006

Republican Sen. George Allen has conceded defeat to Democrat Jim Webb, sealing the Democrats’ control of both houses of Congress and concluding a dramatic fall for a one-time top-tier presidential contender.

Webb, a former Republican and Navy secretary under President Reagan, claimed victory early Wednesday after election returns showed him with a narrow lead of about 7,200 votes out of 2.37 million ballots cast.

U.S. Sen. George Allen will concede defeat Thursday in his re-election bid, a close adviser told The Associated Press, sealing the Democrats’ takeover of the Senate and concluding a dramatic fall for a man once considered a presidential contender.

The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity because Allen’s campaign had not yet publicly confirmed his intentions. Allen and Democrat Jim Webb both planned news conferences Thursday afternoon.

In a remote and dangerous corner of Afghanistan, under the protective roar of Apache attack helicopters and B-52 bombers, special agents and investigators did their work. They walked the landscape with surviving witnesses. They found a rock stained with the blood of the victim. They re-enacted the killings — here the U.S. Army Rangers swept through the canyon in their Humvee, blasting away; here the doomed man waved his arms, pleading for recognition as a friend, not an enemy.

“Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat fucking Tillman, damn it!” he shouted, again and again.

Emboldened by their congressional election triumph and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s resignation, Democrats say they will use their new clout to force a change in Iraq policy and demand that President Bush start bringing troops home.

Rumsfeld’s resignation — and Bush’s pledge to work with Democrats on issues facing the nation — came after months of the president backing Rumsfeld and insisting the war in Iraq was on track. His arguments lost steam after voters catapulted Democrats to power in Tuesday’s voting, giving Democrats control of both the House and Senate next year.

President Bush was left weakened and more isolated than at any time in his presidency by Tuesday’s Democratic thumping of Republicans. He offered Democrats gestures of reconciliation — and capitulated to demands for Donald H. Rumsfeld’s removal — but history suggests his last two years will be filled with more confrontation and challenges.

Appropriately for the voters’ stunning rebuff of the president and his party, the day was damp and gloomy. A small group of protesters outside the White House held signs saying “Bush Be Gone” and called for him to be tried for war crimes.

Inside the East Room, President Bush, in a moment when his presidency might well be over in all but name, was confident and good-humored, even if, as one observer remarked, he seemed a little over-caffeinated.

Message to Democrats on winning the U.S. House: this was no mandate. Republican ineptitude handed House control to Democrats, not Democratic superiority.

Just as President Bush deserves Olympic gold for overreaching (he called himself a uniter and governed like a seismic divider) Democrats run the risk of legislating from the extremities and living to regret it.

Democrats have completed their sweep of the US Congress by capturing control of the Senate, handing President George W. Bush a stunning defeat that alters the political landscape for years to come.

A Democratic victory in a tight Senate race in Virginia late Wednesday capped a dramatic day of developments that earlier saw Bush dump his much-criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the first casualty of an election seen as a referendum on the Iraq war.

The winners and the voters who were swayed by their words, personal charm and negative ads have a big job ahead translating the mid-term election from fiction into reality.

What we the people had in store already was evident back in June. A group of policy wonks met at the National Press Club to ponder “Is Politics Brain-Dead?” The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reported that “confronted with the tough issues _ Iraq, immigration, the minimum wage _ lawmakers weighed their options and then went with their default position: exchange taunts.”