Quotes of the Day

This was a big deal. Certainly, it was the end of George W. Bush's radical experiment in partisan governance. It might have been even bigger than that: the end of the conservative pendulum swing that began with Ronald Reagan's revolution. Not only did the Democrats lay a robust whupping on the Republicans in the midterm elections, but—far worse—the President was forced into a tacit acknowledgment that the defining policy of his Administration, the war in Iraq, was failing. In 1994, when Bill Clinton lost both houses of Congress, he merely replaced his consultants and, liberated from the liberal wing of his party, sailed into the enforced moderation of divided government.

Last week George W. Bush replaced Donald Rumsfeld, the blustery symbol of American arrogance overseas—and, after six years of near total control at home, had to adjust to a situation in which his vision had been rejected by the voters and his power seriously truncated. Rumsfeld was replaced by Robert Gates, who had been a junior associate on the foreign policy team of President George H.W. Bush and was well schooled in the cautious "realism" that marked the reign of Bush the Elder.

In fact, if there was a common strand in last week's Democratic victories and Republican defeats, it was the ascendancy of realists. The architects of the Democratic victory, Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Rahm Emanuel, had calculated with cold-eyed efficiency which candidates the party would support, regardless of the extent of their orthodoxy. On the Republican side, realists seemed to be taking over the national security apparatus—even if was not yet clear that the President would follow their advice.

Bush's decision to delay the sacking of Rumsfeld until after the election will undoubtedly stand as one of the greatest mistakes of his presidency. It was a purely political decision, straight from the Karl Rove playbook: show no sign of weakness or indecision in the midst of a campaign—or, as Bill Clinton neatly summarized it, Strong and wrong beats weak and right. Not this time. "Strong and wrong" may have cost Bush the election. It may also have cost him whatever chance he had for a dignified exit from Iraq. His refusal to change his team and his strategy prevented an effective response to the centrifugal disintegration of Iraq over the past few months. The exit polls indicate that the war was not the main issue in the 2006 election: the general odor of corruption and incompetence emanating from Washington seemed to be the real motivator. But the Administration's stubbornness on Iraq, neatly symbolized by Rumsfeld's detachment from reality, certainly didn't help the G.O.P. cause.

While the U.S. was holding an election, Iraq's democratically elected government was proving itself a failure. "It's become clear that the Maliki government has made things worse across the board," a senior Administration official told me. The biggest winner has been the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is the most popular and probably the most powerful leader among the dominant Iraqi Shi'ites. In the past year, according to U.S. military and intelligence sources, the Iranians have placed their bets on al-Sadr, "doubling down" on their support for his militia, the Mahdi Army. As a result, leaders of both the U.S. military and the intelligence community have come to the conclusion that a major change of policy, an effort to prevent al-Sadr from eventually taking power, is in order. The mind-numbing difficulty of the situation had some very serious people grasping at straws, cracking jokes.

"It's a Mick Jagger moment," the senior Administration official told me. "You can't always get what you want. The question is, Can we get what we need?" What we wanted was democracy; what we need is stability. No fewer than three efforts are under way to figure out how to achieve that goal—the Iraq Study Group, chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton; a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs' study group in the Pentagon. Up until last week, the biggest question was whether the President understood he was facing a Mick Jagger moment. But his selection of Gates and his constant references to the Baker commission may indicate that Bush now recognizes the futility of the neoconservative fantasy of an Iraqi democracy imposed by an American invasion—or it may have just been palliative spin, in a week when it was wise to seem humble. Either way, the dramatic turn for the worse in Iraq means that the President's previous policy—hang on with the current troop levels and hope for the best—cannot be sustained. And the dramatic turn toward the Democrats in Washington means that Bush's new Iraq policy will require bipartisan support. Last week the incoming Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was asked if the Senate might legislate troop withdrawals if the President didn't figure out a way to begin them. "It may come to that," he said.

Of course, it is assumed by most people in Washington that bipartisan efforts on even the smallest matters, much less the war in Iraq, will be near impossible. You've heard the arguments: the House of Representatives will be controlled by ancient liberals of Vietnam vintage, just itching to investigate and indict; Bush has shown precious little inclination toward compromise in his various moral crusades—tax cuts, Social Security reform, the war—and Dick Cheney has shown even less. The standard postelection gestures toward peace and bipartisanship certainly seemed more starchy than genuine. The President opened his press conference with an ironic shot at the media: "Why all the glum faces?" If Jane Austen were writing a novel about Bush's public aspect, the title would be Pride and Petulance. But for the sake of argument and in the hope that sanity will prevail, let me make a mild case for optimism.

First, there is the muscular realism of the Democrats who ran the election campaigns, Schumer and Emanuel. They chose their candidates on pragmatism, not principle. Yes, many of the winners tended to be moderates, but that's because this was an election, especially on the House side, waged in moderate districts. In some cases, realism meant supporting the more liberal candidate. In Ohio, Reid and Schumer made a stark decision to force the attractive if inexperienced Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett out of the race and to support Congressman Sherrod Brown, a feisty paleoliberal whose vehement protectionism matched well with Ohio's economic desperation. In Pennsylvania, Reid and Schumer went with a pro-life candidate, Bob Casey Jr., despite shrieks from the party's pro-choice base. The common denominator wasn't liberalism or moderation but the ability to win. The question now is whether "winning" means blocking the President or demonstrating the ability to govern. It probably means a little of both, but I suspect the Democrats will be better served by proving they have the maturity to do the latter.

Why? Because the American public proved that it had the maturity to ignore, and in many cases rebel against, the sludge tide of negative ads that was splashed onto the public airwaves, primarily by Republicans. (A notable exception: Tennessee's Harold Ford Jr. was taken down by sleazy sexual innuendo.) Americans tossed aside candidates who had associated themselves with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and those who had been involved in sex scandals, and those whose position on immigration slouched toward anti-Hispanic racism, especially in the Rocky Mountain gubernatorial contests and several congressional districts in the Southwest. They chose candidates who, in the felicitous words of Colorado Congressman John Salazar, "have manure on the outside of their boots rather than on the inside." Nowhere was this more literally true than in Virginia, where the operative metaphor actually was footwear. The Democratic challenger, Jim Webb, wore his son's combat boots and the Republican incumbent, George Allen, wore cowboy boots that were unstained (on the outside, at least). Webb's successful antiwar campaign was about the fate of his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Anbar province; Allen's campaign was a dreadful series of gaffes followed by a despicable effort to smear the Democrat by quoting sexually explicit passages from Webb's critically acclaimed war novels. This election was not only about a disastrous war and the stench of corruption, it was also about a style of politics—the slashing negative politics practiced by a generation of media consultants in both parties. It was a message to politicians: stop slinging the manure, and start getting serious about the nation's problems.

Which may be the most compelling case for a bit of optimism in a difficult time. In a meeting with political columnists, Reid said, "It's not a time to get even with the Republicans; it's a time to treat them the way they didn't treat us." And then he announced that he and Nancy Pelosi, who will be Speaker of the House, had decided to open the House-Senate conference committees to the press. This may seem a small point, but it has great symbolic relevance. The conferences are where the most important legislative action takes place, where compromises are worked out between House and Senate versions of legislation and where, in the recent past, all sorts of nefarious special deals for lobbyists and pork for legislators have been inserted without public scrutiny. In the old days, the conferences were public. They've been closed for at least the past 10 years, and during that time, pork-barrel earmarks have increased tenfold. It's not impossible that this arcane little adjustment will restore bipartisan compromise to its honored place as the essential act in a working democracy, and restore pork to its sordid, if greasily necessary, corner of the legislative dance. "We may actually have to work on Saturdays," Reid said, in a reference to the bankers' hours kept by the Republican Congress. "And I want to be clear, bipartisanship doesn't mean hugs and kisses. It's not going to be touch football; it's going to be a free-for-all. We're going to come out of that chamber covered in mud and with plenty of bruises, but that's the only way to get anything accomplished."

After a dark congressional session dominated by such pressing topics as the fate of Terri Schiavo, flag-burning and gay-marriage amendments—and the refusal to seriously address health care, energy independence, immigration or the war in Iraq—Reid's modest promise that his Senators will have some mud on the outside of their boots is realistic...and also kind of exhilarating.

• Joe Klein