Chuck Todd: Congress gets a case of the blues

The Bush factor
There's plenty of evidence to suggest that President Bush may have been the deciding factor that killed the GOP's momentum in some key Senate races over the last week. One Republican consultant is convinced that Bush's last-minute visit to Missouri on behalf of ousted GOP Sen. Jim Talent did the incumbent in. According to the network exit polls, Democrat Claire McCaskill crushed Talent among those late-breaking voters who decided in the final three days (a full 11 percent of the electorate). Bush also made a last-minute trip to Montana, where anecdotal evidence indicates the president's rally for Republican Conrad Burns stopped the incumbent's momentum in Billings.

It's hard not to look at the White House and wonder if it was flying blind. For 18 months, there was evidence that this was going to be a tough midterm thanks to basic history (six-year itch, after all) and the war in Iraq. So why didn't Karl Rove attempt to do what he did in '02 and '04 and dictate the terms of the debate? It was clear this was going to be a national election, yet the White House stuck to its "stay the course" guns for way too long. Northeastern Republicans were desperate for Bush to pivot on Iraq and he just wouldn't do it. When he finally did, it was too late.

The political arm of the Bush White House doesn't usually miss this badly, but it appears this election was misjudged from the beginning. Maybe they believed all the "genius" books that were being written about them.

So if the Republicans clearly lost this election, does that mean the Democrats really won? Technically, yes. But Democrats should realize that the decisive voters in the key House and Senate races fired the Republicans, first and foremost.

Now, the Democrats are left with a coalition that's bigger and broader than any the party has had since the 1970s. In the Senate, the Democratic freshman class is a hodgepodge of old-time populists in the mold of Harry Truman or even Scoop Jackson. These new senators are pro-labor, but socially moderate. They all seem to evoke a hawkishness on defense even while criticizing Iraq..

The new House Democrats, for the most part, are fairly moderate. Ideologically, they do not match the House Democratic lions who are about to assume key chairmanships. It will be interesting to see how Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., handles the class of '06, because many members will begin their terms with a bullseye on their backs for '08. Those liberal House Democrats can't go overboard, or they'll hurt the very member that got them back to the gavels.

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