President George Bush’s job is a lot tougher this morning, after the
Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, breaking the
conservative monopoly of power in Washington and clearing the way for
congressional investigations into the conduct of the Iraq war.The
future of the Senate still hangs in the balance, with two states yet to
be decided. The Montana count is tight but leaning towards the
Democrats, while in Virginia lawyers were preparing to fight over the
outcome. The Democratic challenger, Jim Webb, holds a lead of a few
thousand out of 2.3m votes cast. If the vote is close enough, with less
than a 0.5% margin, Virginia state law gives the loser the option of
calling for a recount once the first count has been finalised by
November 27.
In the early hours of the morning, the
Republican incumbent, Senator George Allen, said counting would
continue throughout the night and he called on his supporters to watch
the tally "like eagles and hawks". Even before the sun rose over
Virginia, both parties were firing off emails to sympathetic lawyers
calling on them to prepare do battle over provisional ballots, absentee
ballots, challenges to results from computerised voting machines and
every other legal grey area.
Complicating
the picture still further, the FBI opened an investigation into alleged
fraud and intimidation involving phone calls made to Democratic voters
in Virginia falsely claiming their names were not on the electoral
rolls or giving false information about the location of polling
stations.
Elsewhere, the Democrats made Senate gains in Missouri,
Ohio, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Joe Lieberman won the Connecticut
race standing as an independent. He beat the Democratic candidate, Ned
Lamont, but has pledged to vote with the Democrats in the new chamber.
The
Democrats also won a brace of governorships, putting the party in power
in a majority of states, an important boost to the party nationwide and
a strategic advantage for the 2008 presidential election.
The
president will give a press conference at 1pm (1800 GMT) and the
Democrats will be listening critically to his tone as they try to gauge
how ready he is to work with the new Congress and compromise over the
management of the war. By then, Mr Bush will almost certainly have made
the call he must have feared most, saying "Congratulations, Madam
Speaker" to Nancy Pelosi, who Republicans turned into a hate figure in
the last days of the campaign.
Ms Pelosi, a tough, resoundingly
liberal Democratic leader from San Francisco will become the first
woman ever to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives, where
the party looked likely to gain 30 or more seats.
Among other
milestones passed last night, Bernie Sanders of Vermont became the
first socialist in the US Senate and Deval Patrick was elected governor
of Massachusetts, only the second black governor in US history. Keith
Ellison in Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to the House of
Representatives.
As speaker, Ms Pelosi will be in a powerful
position. She will appoint the chairs of the all-important House
committees – which can launch enquiries and ask difficult questions
about the Iraq war and other issues – and she will control the
legislative agenda in the chamber. She and her party will also have a
powerful say over taxes and spending.
In theory, the job gives
her less sway over foreign policy, but in her victory speech last
night, she made it clear she would not be bound by such traditional
constraints. "Today the American people voted for change and they voted
for Democrats to take our country in a new direction and that is
exactly what we intend to do. And nowhere did the American people make
it clear they wanted a change more than in Iraq," Ms Pelosi told a
crowd of supporters in Washington. "And so we say to the president, Mr
President we need a new direction in Iraq. Let us work together to find
a new solution to the war in Iraq."
She promised to restore
"civility and bipartisanship" to the political process in Washington.
Whether that happens remains a major unanswered question. In France
they call it cohabitation, but in the US a situation in which a
president from one party has to work with a Congress from another is
usually known as gridlock.
Cooperation between the White House
and a Democratic majority in the House would require a sea-change in
political style on the president’s part. On the basis of the most
questionable mandates in 2000, he governed as if he had won a landslide.
It
will also require some tough decisions from Ms Pelosi, who must bridge
the gap between the liberals on her wing of the party and its
conservatives, boosted by the new intake of House Democrats such as
Heath Shuler from conservative "red" states. Mr Shuler won his seat in
the deepest Republican territory of North Carolina only because he
stood as a social conservative, opposed to abortion, gun control and
gay marriage.
Gay marriage was one of the big losers in the
election as a string of ballot initiatives calling for a ban were
passed. In South Dakota, however, a proposal to ban abortion under
almost all circumstances was defeated.
Overall, the election
continued a long political realignment in the US, leaving the
demarcation line between a Republican south and a Democratic north-east
and west even more pronounced. The biggest Republican losses last night
were "behind enemy lines" in the liberal east, holdovers from a more
bipartisan age. By that measure the sharp geographical divide in US
politics just got deeper.