Americans have used the midterm elections to send a resounding message of no-confidence in their president. But victory was not entirely sweet for the Democrats. Our US editor, Andrew Stephen, reports
The White House knew the game was up as early as last Monday morning. Its schedule that day, distributed to the White House media pool, showed that Charlie Crist - the 50-year-old moderate Republican candidate hoping to succeed Jeb Bush, Dubbya's younger brother, after his maximum two terms as Florida's governor - would introduce the 43rd US president at a campaign rally in Pensacola, for which Bush was flying in specially on Air Force One.
But Crist, much to Bush's rage, had done a bunk: he simply could not face the prospect of election-eve footage of himself cavorting with Bush all over local television news that evening, and had hightailed it downstate to Palm Beach so that he would avoid even being seen side by side with him. Bush thus found himself at a campaign rally, attended by 10,000 excitable Republicans, with nobody actually to campaign for - other than Katherine Harris, 49, the disastrous senatorial candidate whom the Republicans had long since abandoned and who had become such an embarrassment that she was not even allowed on the stage. (She was subsequently one of Tuesday evening's first Republican losers.)
Even Karl Rove, America's high priest of electoral smear tactics, was unprepared and visibly humiliated. Then, just to rub salt in the wound, Crist flew back north later to Jacksonville to appear at a rally with John McCain - currently the front runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. In that symbolic moment, Bush became the lame-duck president, contemptuously and publicly discarded even by his party; and 70-year-old McCain, as predicted here last year, became the anointed de facto Republican leader.
Thus Florida, again, became the focal point for the changing of America's political guard. Replacing Jeb in the gubernatorial mansion in Tallahassee in January will be Governor Crist; and Harris, who presided over Dubbya's "victory" over Al Gore as Florida's "secretary of state" in 2000, is consigned to deserved, everlasting political obscurity. We can now expect Rove to try to exact revenge on Crist by spreading vicious personal smears in much the same way as he effectively destroyed McCain in 2000: expect rumours, in this case, to surface mysteriously about the recently divorced Crist's sexuality.
But there was no mistaking the underlying message of the midterm elections. The Democrats did not soar to victory in the dramatic way they should have done given the shambles the Republicans are in. Even with Republican congressmen going to jail for corruption, and "sex scandals" erupting all round them - to say nothing of the disastrous Iraq war, a $236bn surplus- turned deficit of the same size, and countless other disasters - there was not the decisive Democratic takeover of the Senate that we could reasonably have expected.
Expect the Democrats now, as we look forward to 2008, to form a circular firing squad in characteristic Democratic fashion as battle commences (yes, yet again) for the party's soul. Will the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and its "Third Way" favoured candidate, 53-year-old former senator John Edwards, win out? Or the muscular, unapologetic aggression of the party chairman, Dr Howard Dean? Or the politics of triangulating pragmatism, as exemplified by Senator Hillary Clinton?
I had a peculiar sense of déjà vu as the results came in throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Pollsters and the media had been so terrified that misleading exit polls would be published that journalists given access to them were literally placed in quarantine, deprived of their precious laptops, mobile phones and Blackberries, until 5pm eastern time; almost immediately after they were released from captivity, sensational rumours of Democratic landslides began to spread like wildfire round Washington.
Bizarrely, the results of CNN and ABC exit polls - that six out of ten voters disapproved of Bush and that the Democrats would comfortably pick up the House and possibly the Senate, too - were soon known in detail by the DC chattering classes, but not a word was breathed to CNN or ABC viewers themselves. Even the BBC was not immune to the paranoia: a strict edict went out from on high that its reporters could accept results and projections from ABC or the Associated Press, but not if they came from other mainstream US news organisations such as CBS or NBC or CNN (don't ask me why).
For me, the saddest and most emblematic result of the night was the defeat in Tennessee of the 36-year-old black Democratic congressman Harold Ford - who had been hoping to leap from the House to the Senate by taking the Republican seat of my friend Dr Bill Frist, who is resigning to concentrate on his doomed bid for the presidential nomination in 2008. I'm sure Ford's defeat will be put down to racism - the Republicans certainly put out some disgusting stuff - but it was more complicated than that.
What saddened me most was the way Ford (whom I know personally) sold his soul during the campaign: he moved so far to the right, boasting of his opposition to gay marriage, his devotion to guns, and how he was "conservative, the best choice", that he became barely recognisable as a Democrat. He lost his way, morphing into a slick young-man-in-a-hurry for whom expediency outweighed principle; his early lead in the polls withered away in favour of his more likeable but oafish Republican opponent, a 54-year-old former mayor of Chattanooga named Bob Corker.
I say that his was an "emblematic" defeat be cause Ford exemplified Democratic pussyfooting and the lack of political self-confidence and chutzpah that has so dogged successive Democrat presidential candidates such as Al Gore and John Kerry. Whatever the headlines say, we should not forget that the Democrats did not really win these 2006 mid term elections; it is far more telling to say the Republicans lost them, and did so because of George W Bush, Iraq, uncertainty over the economy, healthcare, social security, petrol prices, immigration, and so on.
I outlined here a couple of weeks ago how, assuming that the Democrats regained the House, 66-year-old Nancy Pelosi would become House Speaker and thus second in line to the US presidency after Dick Cheney. Now, I suspect, the media will revel in depicting her as a flaky, former hippie lefty from California - but she will have the power to subpoena possibly explosive documents concerning dodgy Bush-Cheney policies, call witnesses to testify under oath about their past adventures, and so on. Nineteen House chairs now fall to the Democrats, and seven of them will go to people over 70 - not an image the Democrats will want to promote.
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As I write, it looks as though the Senate will end up with 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans and two independents whom we can expect to vote with the Democrats - one an eccentric 65-year-old from Vermont named Bernie Sanders who describes himself as a socialist, and the other Joe Lieberman. That suddenly makes Lieberman, 64, enormously powerful - so what is the betting that Bush and Rove will cook up a plot whereby he is offered a post in their administration that he cannot refuse? Maybe even replacing Rummy, who will be stricken with a sudden illness? If Lieberman can be neutralised in this way, the Senate will revert to a 50:50 balance - and so the casting vote will then be in the safe hands of the beloved sharpshooter Cheney.
I was asked on BBC radio a couple of days ago whether Democratic victories would temper Bush's recklessness. I replied that I could answer that only if I could peer into the strange mind of a 60-year-old recovering alcoholic named George W Bush.
Rumours persist here (and I have heard them repeated at a very senior level in the UK, too) that Bush has actually resumed drinking; I throw this into the mix not to sensationalise, but because I have now heard the rumour repeated at a sufficiently high level that I believe we must face the possibility that it might be true.
Bush was huddled inside the White House eating beef and ice cream on election night with Rove, my friend Josh Bolten, and four other trusted aides who will stick with him to the end. He was not drinking on this occasion, I'm assured - but, more than ever, my depiction of an unstable man living out his final days in office inside his bunker seem no longer to be fanciful. Hemmed in by Democratic foes wherever he looks, determined to be remembered in history as an unwaveringly strong leader, and increasingly detached from reality: now that suddenly becomes a very frightening vision indeed.
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