There's an unwritten bargain between the President and the Congress. The President fights the terrorists, and the Congress fights big government. The President's done his end of the bargain, but the Congressional Republicans have performed abysmally, at times even obstructing the War President with cries about terrorists' rights. The only reasons that Congressional Republicans could give to vote for them are: (1) supporting the President against our enemies abroad and (2) the Democrats are even worse. Republicans generally took (1) off the table, at times even acting like liberal Democrats on the defining issue of our time. And the Democrats refused to articulate (2) believably during the campaign season; the Republicans surely wouldn't. Republicans gave American no good reason to vote for them--many defeated incumbents spent their campaigns gloating about odious pork-barrel corrupt spending.
President Bush isn't the problem; he's practically the only elected official in Washington with ANY of our interests at heart, and the time has come for those on this forum to reserve their vitriol for the big-government Congress-creeps who act ambivalent in the war on terrorism yet represent RED districts. Sure, the President's made many mistakes, but Congress has made almost every bad one far WORSE--especially the terrible boondoggle of a Medicare entitlement.
Good points. I think that to a great extent people were simply voting against a Congress they do not feel has served either them or their president well. And it's true, the theoretically GOP Congress has been an obstructionist force from the word go. The Dems couldn't be any worse.
That said, I think Bush should have been a little more aggressive and given out the message that he wasn't going to play with people who didn't support him. However, at the same time, that's just not something that is in his personality, and while he could have been more aggressive in both dealing with the GOP and using his veto pen, it was simply something that wasn't going to happen.