Politics: USA: Democrats add Senate to their conquests resulting from Tuesdays elections, end of era as ground shifts under Prez's feet
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Democrats have won control of the United States Senate, giving them both Houses of Congress that only a few days ago was under Republican control in both Houses. Fox News online reports, "Webb Wins U.S. Senate Seat in Virginia, Allen Expected to Concede Today" (Nov9,2k6).
Democrat Jim Webb has won the U.S. Senate race in Virginia, defeating incumbent Republican Sen. George Allen and giving Democrats control of the Congress for the first time since 1994.Update Nov10,2k6: Rise and Fall of Sen. George Allen
Montana's Republican Senate seat shifted into the Democratic column Wednesday afternoon, giving the party control of 50 seats and leaving Virginia as the lone roadblock to a Democratic sweep or a Republican split of Congress.North America > USA > Elections 2006
Democratic challenger John Tester claimed victory in Montana, besting three-term Republican incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns.
In Virginia, the State Board of Elections announced it would not certify the outcome of the race between the Allen and Webb until Nov. 27, after which recounts could begin. There are no automatic recounts in Virginia. The candidates were separated by about 7,800 votes out of more than 2.3 million cast, with indications from both camps that any final outcome could wind up in court.
Webb is a former Republican who served as Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. A count by The Associated Press showed Webb with 1,172,538 votes and Allen with 1,165,302, a difference of 7,236. Allen was awaiting the result statewide postelection canvass of votes and did not concede the race as of 8:30 a.m. ET Thursday.
However, sources close to Allen told FOX News on Wednesday evening that the incumbent doesn't intend to "drag this out," and that he could concede as early as Thursday afternoon.
Allen would be the last of six GOP incumbents to lose re-election bids in a midterm election marked by deep dissatisfaction with the president and the war in Iraq.Allen shot himself in the foot when he made an off-the-cuff gratuitous racial slur that the media promptly broadcast everywhere. Political office-holders, especially at the h+ level of the US Senate, are expected to set an example in the deployment of verbiage, so it's difficult to regret Allen's loss of his goal and, as it turns out, his party's control of the Senate. More than that, the ever-climbing strength of Webb during the campaign has much to do with the failure of the Republican strategy for the War in Iraq. To me, this failure was beyond planning in its largest aspect, because it turned on the power of Al-Quaeda in Iraq to stir up sufficient Sunnis to murderously provoke elements in the Shi'ite majority to repsond in kind. The promise of a secular government in a Muslim-majority society expressed pluralistically in several different Muslim and other political parties devolved into an all-out sectarian strife of hideous proportions. The misdeeds of Saddam every day pale more and more into the background, while new totalitarians on both the Sunni and the Shi'ite sides become stronger.
Returning to the comparative mundanities of the election, Webb may have won against Allen and the Democrats generally may have triumphed over their predecessors because of the Iraq War (where something new in the American and Iraqi governments' strategies is urgently required), but I still take satisfication in the dumping of the Republicans due to their graft and corruption, and especially the House Republicans' refusal to clean up their act, refusal to end ear-marking in troff-like appropriations practices, and refusal to grant the president a line-by-line veto on appropriations bills. It applies to the Senate as well. Now the Democrats, who have not been immune from the same slyness, have an opportunity to change these practices in alliance with the President. Whether the Dems would have to courage to do so, particularly in regard to line-by-line veto, is quite doubtful. So, we probably will see in the next two years just another turn in the Washington merry-go-round of venality.
-- Politicarp
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