The final weeks of 2006 brought some cheer to antiwar activists in the US and globally. First, Donald Rumsfeld "resigned" as George W Bush's Defence Secretary, then less than four weeks later, the aggressive neo-conservative ideologue, John Bolton, was obliged to stand down as the administration ambassador to the United Nations.
Bush acknowledged with undisguised bitterness that his choice to sit at the UN Security Council now had no hope of winning confirmation from the US Senate.
The singularly abrasive Rumsfeld, often depicted as the "grim reaper" by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, was - aside from Bush himself - the most notorious architect of the blood-soaked morass that Iraq has become. He symbolised continuity with generations of Republican reaction, having featured in Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan's administrations.
His boundless hubris as a champion of the "new American century", where overwhelming technological superiority in the skies would
carpet-bomb the path for the dominance of US-based corporations, had cost his paymaster dear. "Hot button" issues
In addition to the toll of
American dead (then
approaching 3,000) and
wounded (in excess of
20,000), US voters could no longer stomach rhetoric about a "war on terror" lasting generations and the daily diet of lies from the White House and Pentagon, first about non-existent WMDs and then about the supposed "progress towards democracy" in occupied Iraq.
Several issues featured prominently in opinion polls, including an economy that has delivered mounting inequality even as it grew substantially, leaving an estimated 46 million US citizens without any form of health insurance. The Bush years have also seen a rise in child poverty.
The Republicans in Congress also suffered from revelations about the indiscretions of a repressed gay member of Congress, who championed homophobic legislation.
Coming months after a huge influence peddling scandal, the cover-up of a sex scandal only fueled public cynicism about politicians. But without doubt the Iraq war was the crucial question in motivating a wide crosssection of the electorate.
The mid-term elections saw both record spending (exceeding $2.6 billion nationally) and a notable increase in turnout, though still little more than 40% of the eligible electorate.
Voters - not least in such recent Republican strongholds as Ohio and Virginia -took the opportunity to bash the GOP. Whereas pundits after Bush's re-election in 2004 depicted the Democrats
as an organisation restricted
to the North East, industrial
mid-west and parts of the
west coast, the mid-term
polls suggested that the
Republicans were now
increasingly reliant on
redoubts in the "deep South".
Policies by
plebiscite
One distinctive feature of
the US version of bourgeois
democracy is the prevalence
of the local or statewide
ballot initiative. On 7 November voters faced a sometimes bewildering array of questions, with a combined total of more than 200 between the 50 states.
Even though the evangelical "Christian right" managed to mobilise support for "yes" votes in referenda in seven out of eight states to bar same sex marriage or civil partnerships, it could not begin to staunch the flow of votes against a Republican party, which lost some 30 seats in the House of Representatives and six in the millionaires' club otherwise known as the US Senate.
Crucially, the anti-choice ("pro-life") campaign's high profile efforts to secure a blanket ban on all abortions in a referendum in South Dakota failed by a 10 percentage point margin as the electorate defied expectations in a bastion of social conservatism. Elsewhere, voters in two states backed calls for fewer restrictions on stem cell research.
Reflecting mounting unease at grotesque levels of inequality voters in several states overwhelmingly said "yes" in referenda to raising the minimum wage, which has been shrinking in real terms since the mid-1990s. The union bureaucrats, who
channeled tens of millions into Democratic coffers, will be looking for some movement on the minimum wage.
Otherwise, they appear ready
to bide their time until the
2008 presidential election.
Immigration, meanwhile,
was the dog that barked but
ultimately did not feature as
a prominent issue nationally.
Not surprisingly, Arizona was
a key exception, where voters
approved a referendum proclaiming English the state's sole official language by a three-to-one margin. Of course, neither the migrant workers' struggle for citizenship rights nor the prospects for a reactionary anti-migrant backlash have gone away. Contradictory results
Across the country the "harder" anti-war vote was well short of an absolute majority, as illustrated in the Connecticut result for the Senate, where the pro-war incumbent, Joe Lieberman (Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and a man publicly kissed by George Bush), stood as an independent and easily held the seat after losing the Democratic primary to an anti-war opponent.
Even so that Democrat retained some 40% of the popular vote.
The Democrats, who in a very real sense are co-authors of the Iraq war, can speak only of a "new direction" in Iraq in the vaguest terms.
Many of their key standard-bearers remain unrepentant.
Among these is supposed 2008 presidential frontrunner Hilary Clinton, who continues to defend their support for the war, while their winning Senate candidates included such unlikely converts to the "anti-war" cause
as Jim Webb, Secretary of the
Navy under Ronald Reagan.
Nonetheless, the voters
reached for the blunt instrument at their disposal to
whack Bush. Democrats were
the beneficiaries at most
every level of government of
the backlash against the war
and the administration generally.
The electoral alternatives
on offer to their "left" were
few and far between beyond
the local level and most fared
badly. For example, the
Green vote in the US Senate
race in California fell below
the share achieved by Peter
Camejo as the party's candidate for governor in 2003.
Arguably, the self-styled
democratic socialist, Bernie
Sanders, was a quirky exception in the tiny state of
Vermont.
The absence of substantial
policy characterises the party
that will take control of the
Congress from January 2007
in most every respect.
But the Democrats may
well seize their renewed
capacity to use Congressional
committees to scrutinise the Bush administration's mendacious record on everything from Saddam's alleged WMDs through to corruption in the award of Iraq reconstruction contracts and the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In short, Dubya is looking like the most hobbled of lame ducks.
Does this preclude the launch of another war in his remaining two years at the White House?
Not definitively, but the prospect of an attack on Iran has receded dramatically.
Socialists will harbour no illusions that the 7 November elections marked a truly "seismic shift" in US politics, but at the same time voters did give a bloody nose to the most authoritarian and militaristic factions within the US ruling class.
The unholy and inherently unstable alliance between big oil, heavy engineering capital, and frightened, socially conservative sections of the middle and working classes, and the Christian right has fragmented for now, however right-wing some of the Democratic victors.
With the appointment as Pentagon supremo of his father's Texan ally, former
CIA chief Bob Gates, a combination of the ferocity of
fighting in Iraq and
November's electoral debacle
have forced Bush to move
towards a more pragmatic,
multilateral brand of US
imperialism.
Bush's initial rejection of
the key recommendations of
Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study
Group for a phased US withdrawal is likely to prove an
attempt to save face.
The ISG report will only
grow in currency for both the
White House and Congress
as the two main parties grope
towards an exit strategy that
could even include a limited
rapprochement with those
spokes in the "axis of evil",
Iran and Syria.
Finally, the results of the
US mid-term polls suggest
that the emergence of a genuine third party, based on the
organised sections of the
working class and the
oppressed, is no nearer, however pressing the need.
At the same time, though,
the Democratic victory
should propel those sections
of the US anti-war movement
around United for Peace and
Justice, who have been reluctant to rock the Democratic
electoral bandwagon back on
to the streets.
George Binette is a supporter of
the Permanent Revolution
Group