Republicans Needed This

I'm not a party-line guy, but I am a Republican mainly because I agree with Republican ideas more often than I disagree. Given this, it's hard to say I'm happy about yesterday's election results. But I do think in the end, Republicans needed this loss.

I remember back to 1994. The Democrats in Congress who had been in power for many years looked tired and complacent, and had been embroiled in various scandals going back a number of years. It was very hard for me, or most people, to look at them and particularly their leadership and see anything forward-looking. These were tired old men desperately trying to hold onto a power that was entirely too familiar to them. They got beaten, badly. And they needed it.

Fast forward to 2006. Republicans in Congress have done very little in the last 2 years. They have been sloppy, complacent, and have been embroiled in various scandals over the last couple of years. They have largely abandoned their oversight function of the war. And while many Republicans on the Hill have been uneasy about how the war has been prosecuted, they were willing to go along so long as everyone was winning and holding onto power. Now that that's over, I think we'll see a lot of Republicans seemingly coming out of nowhere insisting that things need to change in Iraq and elsewhere. Put simply, Republicans needed to be shaken up and snapped back into reality, and this election was the first step in that process.

I have no doubt that in the coming days, Pelosi/Reid and Bush will all say the right things about working together. But each of these players is a partisan, and none of them will be particularly interested in working with the other side on much of anything. We will have gridlock. But for the Democrats, this will be a victory. The Democrats never offered the country much in the way of a domestic agenda during the campaign, so achieving little on the domestic front is not really a letdown. What the Democrats wanna do is put the brakes on the war, and this they will do, with Republican help.

It is very unclear if Bush possesses the same skill as Clinton when it comes to adjusting your approach to governing after getting pummeled in a congressional election. I doubt it. It is also unclear if the Republican apparatus as a whole has the ability to thoughtfully self-examine itself and emerge with fresh vitality. It took the Democrats 12 long years to regain any kind of congressional control through the ballot box. Will it take Republicans just as long or longer to get back on track? That's the question. But what's clear is that Republicans had grown stale while in power, and they needed to get kicked around a bit to wake them up. How will they respond?