Rumsfeld Resigns After Democrat Victory

Taken from Daily Telegraph, UK, 08.11.06
By Toby Harnden

President George W Bush took responsibility for his party’s "thumping" election defeat tonight, announcing that he was replacing Donald Rumsfeld, his embattled defence secretary, because of the need for a "fresh perspective" on Iraq.



Video (ITN & Telegraph): Video: Bush on Democrats' 'good night'

The "agreed" resignation came after Republicans lost control of the 435-member House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years.

It was a landslide that threatened also to deliver the Senate into Democratic hands. Although recounts were being debated, Republicans trailed narrowly in both Virginia and Montana.
Democrats had earlier wrested Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island and Missouri from the Republicans, edging them closer to the six seats they needed to secure a majority in the 100-member upper chamber.

Appointing Robert Gates, a former Central Intelligence Agency director, the president said Mr Rumsfeld, 74, admitted that America was bogged down in Iraq.

Just a week ago Mr Bush had insisted that the controversial Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney were "doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them".

Mr Bush acknowledged that voters had been angry about Iraq. "I recognise that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress being made there."



He was clearly stunned by the scale of his party’s defeat.

"It was a thumping," he conceded. "I thought we were going to do fine yesterday. That shows what I know."

He realised, he said, that Washington had changed and vowed to work with Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi, a liberal congresswoman from San Francisco, will become the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives and arguably the second most powerful politician in Washington.

Mrs Pelosi hailed "the beauty and the genius of our democracy" that had elected so many Democrats. "The American people spoke with their votes, and they spoke for change and they spoke in support of a new direction for all Americans," she said.

The presumptive front-runners for the parties' presidential nominations in 2008 acknowledged the scale of the Republican setback. Senator Hillary Clinton, who won a thumping victory in New York, said: "Last week, the vice president said regardless of the outcome, the administration would go full speed ahead in the same direction. Well, I think the American people have said, 'Not so fast!'"

The leading Republican prospect, John McCain, said the party was unmoored from its principles. "I think people have a frustration," he said.

Polls showed corruption was the top source of voter discontent - more so than the Iraq war.

The Republican leadership in the Congress has been beset by a series of scandals. A majority of the 15 tainted congressman facing re-election lost at the polls.


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The American press agrees: the election was a referendum on Bush
By Sally Peck

The US media and bloggers today identified the fall in President George W. Bush's personal popularity as the main reason for the Republicans' loss of control of the House of Representatives and their struggle to hold onto the Senate.

Whether liberal or conservative, bloggers and comment writers alike saw the mid-term elections as a referendum on Mr Bush's leadership and a vote of no-confidence in his handling of Iraq.

The New York Times proclaimed the mid-terms 'a loud message for Bush', noting that any major initiative in his final two years in office will have to be, by definition, bi-partisan.

The LA Times argued that the Democrat victory was largely explained by the fact that the Republican party, often called the GOP or Grand Old Party, ceded the political centre to the Democrats.

Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist, wrote on her blog: "The GOP lost. Conservatism prevailed. 'San Francisco values' may control the gavels in Congress, but they do not control America." She also observed that gay marriage bans won approval in three states

Meanwhile, The Huffington Post celebrated the coming to power of Speaker Pelosi, after the House majority win for the Democrats made Nancy Pelosi, the California congresswoman, its first woman speaker.

Andrew Sullivan, the Time Magazine blogger, wrote that the election results send a clear message: "Fire. Rumsfeld. Now."

Michael Ledeen, the neoconservative, writing on the National Review Online's group blog, called the results simply typical of a sixth-year election, not a paradigm shift.

The Conservative blog little green footballs, summed up as follows: " With the House in Democrat control, we can expect to see flying subpoenas and impeachment hearings, and big parties across the Middle East."