WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- It turned out to be a Democratic wave, but no tidal wave, that swept them to a workable majority in the House of Representatives. But the Democrats look poised to have a barely workable one in the Senate, whatever may happen with the recounts and possible legal battles over the count in Virginia and Montana.
Even if the Democrats finally win both of the outstanding Senate seats, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was re-elected as an independent, after being beaten in the Democratic primary in a well-organized coup by the anti-war Left. Outraged by his support for President George W. Bush's policies in Iran, the Internet-based blogging community managed to organize sufficient new Democratic Party members in the state to defeat Lieberman.
And then the heavyweights of the Democratic Party came into connectivity to campaign against him, including his long-standing fellow senator from the same state, Chris Dodd. Lieberman owes his old party almost nothing. He has said he will caucus with them, to guarantee his seniority in the Senate. This also means that if the Dems finally take Virginia and Montana, his vote will help them win the committee chairmanships and staff positions and the other privileges that go with the majority.
But Lieberman has given notice that the Democrats cannot expect him to submit to party discipline and cannot count on his vote -- particularly on matters to do with Iraq, and given Lieberman's staunch support for Israel, with policy on the Middle East more generally.
On election night, Democratic party chairman told a CNN interviewer that the Democrats would not "cut and run" from Iraq, and that there would only be "thoughtful consideration" of an eventual drawdown of U.S. troops after the country had been stabilized.
And if Ronald Reagan's former secretary of the U.S. Navy, Jim Webb, does become the new Democratic senator for Virginia, then his broadly conservative and deeply patriotic views will mean another Senate vote that is as likely to help Bush as hinder him. A highly-decorated Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam (his wife is Vietnamese and he speaks the language fluently), Webb is not a traditional Democrat. He opposes gun control and is very tough on illegal immigration and free trade. On Iraq, Webb's position is that his beloved U.S. military has been betrayed in Iraq by bad strategy and worse planning, and that the Bush administration misled the nation by linking Saddam Hussein to the war on terrorism and ended up fighting the wrong war in the wrong place. Webb is just the most obvious example of the way that the new Democrats of the 2006 election cycle are notably more centrist and conservative, tending like Webb to have military backgrounds and to be strongly religious, like the newly-elected Heath Shuler in North Carolina, who opposes abortion and is so devout that he refused to campaign on Sundays.
This was the deliberate recruitment policy of Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, a veteran of Bill Clinton's White House political staff, who ran the party's Congressional Campaign Committee and decided the Democrats needed candidates who could fend off the usual Republican charges that Democrats were so many liberal and secular wimps.
It may not look it, as the California liberal Nancy Pelosi becomes the first female Speaker of the House, and the old bulls of the Democrats like John Dingell and John Murtha and Charlie Rangel take over key committee chairmanships, but the center of gravity of the Democratic party has shifted significantly to the right.
In policy terms, this means that we are unlikely to see any dramatic new policies in Iraq. The democrats have no consensus and like the Bush White House, they are waiting for the Wise Men report fro the Iraq Study Group led by of former Secretary of State Jim Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. The Democrats will not try to use the power of the purse to strangle the United States or military efforts in Iraq, nor will the party leadership permit any effort to impeach President Bush, however much the likely Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers says he would like to.
The Democrats are likely to focus on three or four main issues, starting with the imposition of tough new ethics rules for Congress, an increase in the minimum wage, and some very high-profile oversight of the conduct and planning of the war. Expect the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff get a blizzard of subpoenas to face serious grilling from House committees.
Along the way, there is likely to be one big casualty -- the hopes of a successful conclusion to the Doha round of World Trade talks. President Bush's mandate to negotiate such a deal and submit it to Congress for a simple 'yes' or 'no' (rather than a long Congressional investigation into every last clause and comma) runs out in June. There is now almost zero chance that a new Doha deal can be reached by then, and even less thereafter, because the new Democrats are notably more protectionist. Speaker Pelosi, for starters, is a longtime critic of China's trade (and human rights) practices.
These midterm elections have been about the irresistible force of Democrat and anti-war anger meeting the immovable abject of the Republican party's built-in advantages in Congressional re-districting, in money, and in the party's formidable Get-Out-The-Vote machinery. The Democrats just managed to prevail. But now they face another object that will be very, very hard to move -- President Bush's veto.
Moreover, as Democratic chairman Howard Dean told CNN on election night, "there isn't much we can do to change the president's policies." Not with Jim Webb, Joe Lieberman and Heath Shuler all helping to redefine just what a Democrat is these days.
