Inside Politics

Early targets

“Halliburton, the CIA and big tobacco companies are among the early targets identified by top Democratic staff to ABC News as likely targets for investigation once the Democrats take control of the House at the beginning of next year,” Rhonda Schwartz reports at ABC.com.

“The staffers say Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi … has told top Democratic donors there is a ‘100-hour agenda’ she wants to push through — taking on the minimum wage, drug and energy prices and corruption.

“Defense contractors, including Halliburton, the intelligence rationale for the war in Iraq and CIA secret prisons are what one staffer called ‘uninvestigated scandals.’ ”

Deadly perception

“This defeat had a thousand fathers,” the editors of National Review said yesterday at www.nationalreview.com.

“There will be a temptation simply to blame President Bush for it, given the liberal interest in continuing to weaken him and the congressional-Republican interest in avoiding blame. … But let’s not forget how many wounds the congressional GOP inflicted on itself,” the magazine said.

“Republicans lost roughly 29 seats in the House. If party leaders had forced Don Sherwood, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley out in 2005 or early 2006, they would have cut that total by three and been able to spend more resources turning narrow defeats into narrow victories. Tom DeLay and Curt Weldon should have left earlier, too. In the Senate, Conrad Burns should have been forced out. Had Ohio governor Bob Taft been pressured to resign early, a number of races there might have turned out differently.

“It is congressional Republicans, more than the president, who are responsible for the loss of the party’s reformist credentials. Republicans were perceived not just as the party in government, but as the party of government. That perception, deadly for the relatively conservative party in our politics, was accurate.”

Western erosion

“This one is pretty easy to explain,” Fred Barnes writes at www.weeklystandard.com.

“Republicans lost the House and probably the Senate because of Iraq, corruption, and a record of taking up big issues and then doing nothing on them. Of these, the war was by far the biggest factor. Unpopular wars trump good economies and everything else. President Truman learned this in 1952, as did President Johnson in 1968. Now, it was President Bush’s turn, and since his name wasn’t on the ballot, his party took the hit,” Mr. Barnes said.

“The defeat for Republicans was short of devastating — but only a little short. The House seats the party lost in New York and Connecticut and Pennsylvania will be hard to win back. Just as Republicans have locked in their gains in the South over the past two decades, Democrats should be able to solidify their hold on seats in the Northeast, as the nation continues to split sharply along North-South lines.

“What should worry Republicans most, however, is erosion of its strength in the West and in two states in particular: Colorado and Arizona. Four years ago, Colorado was solidly Republican. Since then, Democrats have won a Senate seat, two House seats, the governorship, and both houses of the state legislature. At the state level, that’s realignment.

“In Arizona, Republicans dropped two House seats and Republican Sen. John Kyl got a mild scare. Kyl, by the way, may be the finest and most able senator in Washington. He’s certainly in the top five. Meanwhile, Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano cruised to victory.

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