Christopher Caldwell

The message of this wipeout is that Americans believe they’ve lost the war

Christopher Caldwell says that the mid-term elections were a landslide in which the Republicans paid a heavy price for Iraq, for sexual scandals and for ugly campaigning. Withdrawal from Iraq, inquiries, impeachment: anything is possible now

issue 11 November 2006

Washington

On Monday afternoon, President Bush addressed a crowd of several thousand Republican supporters in Pensacola, Florida. The appearance was meant to shore up the sputtering campaign of Charlie Crist, the Republican candidate to succeed Mr Bush’s brother Jeb as governor of Florida. Crist was one of the rare Republican candidates willing to appear with the President in public. Until this week, that is. Crist (who won his race in the end) stood Bush up. He suddenly remembered that his campaign was ‘doing very well in Pensacola’ and that there were a lot of votes to be canvassed for in Palm Beach, several hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush, appearing solo, gave his standard speech. ‘As you go to the polls,’ he told the assembled crowd, ‘remember we’re at war.’

‘Oh, but we do,’ the country replied, in its way, a day later. Democrats took 34 seats in the House of Representatives, their best showing since 1974.

Written by
Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

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