2006 election analysis

I was busy reading the results of exit polls from the November 7th elections and glanced up at the TV. The story of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation was breaking and I put down my papers to digest the news. It certainly wasn’t a shock. A day earlier Americans had repudiated the Iraq war policy and given Bush and the Republicans, to use W.’s own term, a thumping. To save his presidency – and his party’s chances of holding the White House in 2008 – Bush had to show Rumsfeld the door. Everyone knew that, especially the politicians who’d lined up to call for Rummy’s head weeks earlier. It was an open secret that a thumping would lead immediately to a dumping.

Rumsfeld’s departure brought back a sudden reminiscence of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, when SecDef Bob McNamara was also a symbol of an imperialist adventure gone bad. President Lyndon Johnson was dumped by his own party in 1968, at the height of the conflict. America was discovering its new anti-war heart. Fighting fascism in World War II was a moral cause. Fighting communism in Korea quickly became a forgotten one. Vietnam was a turning point for this country – evident in how deeply it polarized and inflamed the nation.

After Vietnam, Americans did not want to go to war and every president knew it. When the American military engaged, it did so quickly, surgically and, wherever possible, without ground troops – meaning, without casualties. Though the dominant, conservatized culture had officially pronounced the 1960s dead, buried and misguided, it was nonetheless the case that America had become a country loathe to go to war.

But Bush’s neo-cons – oddly enough, the extremists in a circle of political thinkers who came originally from the Left – wanted to remake America and Americans as warriors. And for a time, actually a short time, a slim majority of Americans allowed Bush and the neo-cons to have their fingers on the button. So off to war we went, with a compliant Democratic Party going along every step of the way. They heartily joined in the national chorus that tried to humiliate and marginalize opponents of war.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Fallujah. American body bags were back on our TV screens – and suddenly we had to deal with the issue of whether we really wanted to go down that road again. Yes, we’d lost 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Must we compound that loss with a war that was quickly proving to be unaffordable and, worse still, unwinnable?

Americans looked to our elected political leaders for an answer, but nobody said a word. And so, as has often been the case throughout U.S. history, ordinary Americans – with no special title and with no political label – began to speak out. You saw these independents surface in 2004 in support of Howard Dean’s anti-war presidential bid. Then you saw them crushed by the party machine, which counseled caution and chose to run a pro-war candidate who would simply manage our presence in Iraq more competently. The Democrats’ bid for power failed.

But the independents kept on coming. You heard their voice in the polls that showed them turning against the war and you saw them propel Ned Lamont to a brief but signal victory in Connecticut, where anti-war independents who voted in the Democratic primary (it was an open primary) coupled with black voters to topple Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman would go on to win reelection on an independent line – but not before the Democrats had gotten the message. If there was a serious shot at taking Congress – and given the disastrous state of the Iraq situation there damned well better be – the Democratic Party was going to have to restyle itself as an opposition force, ready to challenge Iraq policy, and go after those independent voters who had been beating the anti-war drum for more than two years. And it did.

CNN’s Bill Schneider credits independents – who broke two-to-one for Democrats – with the Democratic Party taking control of Congress. He’s right to do so, but he does not credit independents with defining the issue that drove the realignment. That’s not unusual. How many articles have been written about the 1994 Republican Revolution which omit that the GOP takeover of the House was accomplished by deftly recasting itself in the mold set by the Perot movement two years earlier? Too many.

Independents had a good year. Closer to the American people than the major parties are, they helped voters find their anti-war voice. They showed the neo-cons the door. They developed some grassroots organization, “ordained� new rank and file leaders in dozens of states, attracted some quality candidates, and won some fights to keep the independent movement multi-racial and inclusionary. They even brought some old independents back into the game and got them talking to one another for the first time in years.

Electing an independent president may be much further down the road. But independents are already demonstrating their power to define and drive issues that reshape the major parties and their agendas.

The Democratic Party owns Congress for the moment, but it does not own the American people. Nor does the Republican Party. The independent movement may not yet be strong enough to take our country back. But it is strong enough, at the very least, to give our country back its heart.

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