Editorial: Mandate for change

Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006 | 7:35 a.m.

D emocrats made big gains in Tuesday's midterm election, but, more importantly, the American people were the bigger winners. The one-party dominance that Republicans have held over Washington the past six years - a period that has witnessed an unpopular war in Iraq, political scandals and runaway spending - was thankfully ended after Tuesday's election.

Democrat Tessa Hafen narrowly lost her bid to upset Republican Jon Porter in Nevada's 3rd Congressional District, a tossup race, but enough Democrats elsewhere in the nation won to give them control of the House for the first time since 1994. Also late Tuesday evening, Democrats were close to picking up the six Republican seats they needed to gain a majority in the Senate, particularly good news for Nevada's Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate. While Republican senators elsewhere in the country had tough contests, Nevada Sen. John Ensign easily beat Jack Carter.

In many of the House and Senate races that Republicans won, the margins of victory were narrow. In past years the Republicans would have won in landslides. In another sign that Democrats were on the ascendancy, they were making significant gains in the 36 races for governor, with Democrats now holding a majority of the nation's governorships for the first time since 1994.

After President Bush's decisive re-election two years ago, a political observer would have been laughed at if he had suggested that the Democrats could come anywhere close to capturing one of the two houses of the Republican-controlled Congress in 2006.

But the deteriorating war in Iraq, the Bush administration's incompetence in handling the Hurricane Katrina disaster and scandals involving Republican members of Congress changed any notion that Republicans were invulnerable. And Republicans weren't helped at all by the fact that too many of them had become apologists for the president's unpopular policies.

In the months before Election Day, and as the president's unpopularity started to rub off on them, Republican candidates ran as far away from Bush as they could. In U.S. Senate and House races across the country, the Republican nominees took great pains to separate themselves from the president's incredibly abysmal handling of the Iraq war.

While Republican candidates were having to contend with the belief that they were out of touch with the American electorate, many of those Democrats who did well on Election Day were moderate in their political outlook, such as Robert Casey, who defeated one of the top Republican leaders, Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

It's hard to see how Tuesday's results could be viewed as anything other than a repudiation of the Bush administration's incompetence and the hyperpartisanship and right-wing policies stoked by the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress.

Americans want Republicans to stop their obstruction of the Democrats' common-sense solutions to some of the difficult issues confronting our nation, including changing course on the president's failed handling of the Iraq war, getting rid of the culture of corruption that has permeated Washington and taking serious steps to rein in profligate spending.