Ramesh makes a lot of sense here:
From Gigot's Rove column:
A big debate among Republicans these days is who bears more blame for 2006 — Messrs. Bush and Rove, or the behavior of the GOP Congress. Mr. Rove has no doubt. "The sense of entitlement was there" among Republicans, he says, "and people smelled it."
Does it really matter if congressional Republicans were responsible for 49 or 51 percent of the disaster? My own sense is that Iraq would have cost the Republicans the House by itself, but the (accurate) perception that congressional Republicans were mostly in it for themselves compounded the losses.
Right. In some ways this is pretty obvious. If you look at the roster of Republicans who lost--whether they were incumbents or challengers or new candidates vying for abdicated seats--you don't see a comprehensive list of scandal-plagued right-wing politicians (although you do see plenty of them). What you see instead is a mix of moderate Republicans, deeply pro-war conservatives, and a few people tied to the Abramoff investigations. What this says to me is that the animating forces behind the electoral shift were the Iraq war and generally incompetent Republican leadership alone. Scandal didn't help matters much, and may have handed the Senate to Democrats, but that shouldn't leave anybody with the impression that the country was exactly happy with the way the GOP was running things.
If the country had really waken up to scandal, then I think it's fairly safe to say that both Jack Murtha and my long-time congressman Jerry Lewis would have been out of their jobs years ago.
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