No confidence in Bush

ELECTION RESULTS are sometimes susceptible to different readings, but if, as early returns suggested, the Democrats retake the House and make significant gains in the Senate, the midterm message from voters will be a simple one: They've lost confidence in the Bush administration.

And the principal issue driving that loss of confidence is, of course, Iraq.

Or, as US Representative Martin Meehan put it yesterday, "There are three leading issues here: Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq."

It's not as though the Democrats have a consensus approach on the war, of course.

That lack of consensus is one reason President Bush had urged voters to ask the Democrats what their plan is. Politically, that's a smart tactic.

But historically, Bush's question is beside the point.

When congressional elections take on a national hue, they are usually blunt expressions of opposition, and not the careful weighing of alternatives. The 1994 election, in which Republicans gained control of both branches of Congress, is the only midterm in recent memory "where the out party seemed to have anything resembling a platform," notes G. Calvin Mackenzie, professor of government at Colby College.

And even then, Mackenzie notes, post-election polls showed that few voters knew anything about the Contract for America, the Republican congressional manifesto.

Instead, a vote for the out party in a midterm is a way of turning thumbs down on the administration in power. Indeed, in one sense, the lack of a clear Democratic consensus on Iraq makes voter discontent with the Bush administration even more remarkable.

If Democrats take control of even one branch of Congress, voters will have said that what the country needs is not one-party rule, but rather the balance of an empowered opposition in Congress -- even if the alternative offered is no more concrete than deep and vocal skepticism about this administration.

There's no doubt that Iraq, more than any other issue, has driven this election. Gas prices have come down from summer highs to levels that seem almost cheap. The economy is certainly in fair to middling shape, with the unemployment rate relatively low.

Yet despite that, the level of dissatisfaction is huge.

In a recent Gallup poll, only 36 percent of likely voters said they were satisfied with the way things are going, while 61 percent said they were dissatisfied. That's the highest dissatisfaction level at a midterm election since 1994, when voters turned against the congressional Democrats. Gallup's polling also shows that, in open-ended questions, Iraq far outweighs the other concerns on Americans' minds.

Congressional Republicans deserve to lose control on any number of other issues. Certainly the various scandals that have beset Congress, from the Mark Foley matter to the largely Republican affair of Jack Abramoff's influence-buying, have contributed to the deep voter discontent.

So, too, has Congress's failure to make real progress on important national issues.

It's also a Congress that has surrendered its traditional role of oversight. Republican leaders have styled themselves as steadfast allies of the White House rather than any sort of force for accountability.

And as voters have come to recognize, if ever there has been an administration that needs that oversight, it's this one.

Despite the president's repeated assurances that progress is being made, it's clear that most Americans no longer believe him.

The president who had been stubbornly pledging to stay the course has since restyled himself as a commander in chief constantly reviewing and adjusting tactics -- as long as those adjustments don't require sacking a secretary of defense whose colossal mismanagement is now plain for everyone to see.

Everyone, that is, except for the president and the vice president.

As for the decision to invade Iraq in the first place, Americans have decided it was a mistake.

Although that sentiment wavers a bit, at least 55 percent now say we shouldn't have invaded, with only 40 percent saying invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

Even if the president himself can't acknowledge it, the country now realizes he made a huge mistake in going to war. Voters recognize it's time for a new approach -- and the bigger the Democratic gains, the clearer that message will be.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.