US Elections - Economy not enough to draw votes

There is an old saying that paper never refused ink, and politicians never refuse publicity.

Joe Higgins was just looking for publicity in Dáil yesterday when he suggested that the American election results were not only a repudiation of President Bush’s policy on Iraq but also a justification for the withdrawal of landing privileges for American troops passing through Shannon.

It is absurd to suggest that our policy should be in any way determined by the views of the American electorate. There is little doubt that the Republican Party received a bloody nose at the polls on Tuesday. They apparently lost both houses of Congress.

The loss in the House of Representatives was decisive, and the Democrats seemed to pull off what looked like a most unlikely win in the US Senate, where supporters had to hold all of the 18 seats that they were defending and win six of the 15 seats held by Republicans.

In addition, the Democrats won 20 of the 36 races for state governorship, and they dramatically increased the number of states in which they control both houses of the state legislature.

Many hailed the results as a victory for democracy. It shows that people are free to object to the policy of their government, but to say that the vote was for “a change in direction”, as Senator Hillary Clinton and others stated, is a little simplistic.

What changes were people voting for? The American stock market has been at a record high in recent days, as is employment, while unemployment and taxes are at a twenty-year low.

Tax revenue is at a record high, and the value of people’s homes have more than doubled in recent years. Somehow, it seems unlikely that people were calling for a change of direction on those policies.

The American exit polls indicated that the main issue was not the Iraq War but the various scandals that plagued the Republicans in the past year. The election results apparently had more to do with the revenge of the righteous right, than the war in Iraq.

Democrats have usually been splintered, but this year they waged a disciplined and united campaign. When Kerry appeared to put his foot in his mouth over Iraq, he was essentially withdrawn from the political stage.

Many Republicans saw President Bush as a similar embarrassment. He was shunned by many of his party’s candidates and was reduced to campaigning in what had been solid Republican states, like his home state of Texas. Even in Florida, where his brother is the retiring governor, the Republican gubernatorial (governor) candidate patently snubbed the President, and actually won.

As a consequence of the overall election outcome, George W Bush now clearly fits the traditional criterion of a “lame duck President”. But he remains in charge of American foreign policy.

Congress has no formal power to alter that policy in Iraq, except to cut off financial support, but that is not a realistic alternative, because the American people would deeply resent, as a gross betrayal, the withdrawal of such support from their troops in a war situation. Our Government might learn from the American election, however, that a booming economy on its own was not enough to save the government this week.