Even if the Democrats finally win both of the outstanding Senate seats, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was re-elected as an independent, after being beaten in the Democratic primary in a well-organized coup by the anti-war Left. Outraged by his support for President George W. Bush's policies in Iran, the Internet-based blogging community managed to organize sufficient new Democratic Party members in the state to defeat Lieberman.

And then the heavyweights of the Democratic Party came into connectivity to campaign against him, including his long-standing fellow senator from the same state, Chris Dodd. Lieberman owes his old party almost nothing. He has said he will caucus with them, to guarantee his seniority in the Senate. This also means that if the Dems finally take Virginia and Montana, his vote will help them win the committee chairmanships and staff positions and the other privileges that go with the majority.

But Lieberman has given notice that the Democrats cannot expect him to submit to party discipline and cannot count on his vote -- particularly on matters to do with Iraq, and given Lieberman's staunch support for Israel, with policy on the Middle East more generally.

On election night, Democratic party chairman told a CNN interviewer that the Democrats would not "cut and run" from Iraq, and that there would only be "thoughtful consideration" of an eventual drawdown of U.S. troops after the country had been stabilized.

And if Ronald Reagan's former secretary of the U.S. Navy, Jim Webb, does become the new Democratic senator for Virginia, then his broadly conservative and deeply patriotic views will mean another Senate vote that is as likely to help Bush as hinder him. A highly-decorated Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam (his wife is Vietnamese and he speaks the language fluently), Webb is not a traditional Democrat.

He opposes gun control and is very tough on illegal immigration and free trade. On Iraq, Webb's position is that his beloved U.S. military has been betrayed in Iraq by bad strategy and worse planning, and that the Bush administration misled the nation by linking Saddam Hussein to the war on terrorism and ended up fighting the wrong war in the wrong place.

Webb is just the most obvious example of the way that the new Democrats of the 2006 election cycle are notably more centrist and conservative, tending like Webb to have military backgrounds and to be strongly religious, like the newly-elected Heath Shuler in North Carolina, who opposes abortion and is so devout that he refused to campaign on Sundays.

This was the deliberate recruitment policy of Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, a veteran of Bill Clinton's White House political staff, who ran the party's Congressional Campaign Committee and decided the Democrats needed candidates who could fend off the usual Republican charges that Democrats were so many liberal and secular wimps.

It may not look it, as the California liberal Nancy Pelosi becomes the first female Speaker of the House, and the old bulls of the Democrats like John Dingell and John Murtha and Charlie Rangel take over key committee chairmanships, but the center of gravity of the Democratic party has shifted significantly to the right.

In policy terms, this means that we are unlikely to see any dramatic new policies in Iraq. The democrats have no consensus and like the Bush White House, they are waiting for the Wise Men report fro the Iraq Study Group led by of former Secretary of State Jim Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton.

The Democrats will not try to use the power of the purse to strangle the United States or military efforts in Iraq, nor will the party leadership permit any effort to impeach President Bush, however much the likely Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers says he would like to.

The Democrats are likely to focus on three or four main issues, starting with the imposition of tough new ethics rules for Congress, an increase in the minimum wage, and some very high-profile oversight of the conduct and planning of the war. Expect the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff get a blizzard of subpoenas to face serious grilling from House committees.

Along the way, there is likely to be one big casualty -- the hopes of a successful conclusion to the Doha round of World Trade talks. President Bush's mandate to negotiate such a deal and submit it to Congress for a simple 'yes' or 'no' (rather than a long Congressional investigation into every last clause and comma) runs out in June. There is now almost zero chance that a new Doha deal can be reached by then, and even less thereafter, because the new Democrats are notably more protectionist. Speaker Pelosi, for starters, is a longtime critic of China's trade (and human rights) practices.

These midterm elections have been about the irresistible force of Democrat and anti-war anger meeting the immovable abject of the Republican party's built-in advantages in Congressional re-districting, in money, and in the party's formidable Get-Out-The-Vote machinery. The Democrats just managed to prevail. But now they face another object that will be very, very hard to move -- President Bush's veto.

Moreover, as Democratic chairman Howard Dean told CNN on election night, "there isn't much we can do to change the president's policies." Not with Jim Webb, Joe Lieberman and Heath Shuler all helping to redefine just what a Democrat is these days.

related report
Race for 2008 US presidential nominations begins
Washington (AFP) Nov 8 - The end of the 2006 congressional elections marked the start of the 2008 race for the White House on Wednesday, with Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani as the front-runners.

No major candidates have officially announced plans to run for their party's nomination, but with the US House of Representatives in control of the opposition Democrats and the Senate still undetermined, putative hopefuls are positioning themselves for a 2008 bid.

"We believe in our country, and we're going to take it back, starting tonight!" Clinton told supporters in New York late Tuesday, following her re-election as senator for New York.

The former US first lady has a substantial lead in early polls for her party's nomination: An October 27 CNN poll showed Clinton has 38 percent support among Democrats to win the party nomination, 11 points ahead of her nearest rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Clinton had enjoyed a 28 percent lead among Democrats before Obama, born to a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, announced in late October that he was considering a White House run.

In recent weeks, the popular Obama, 45, has been traveling the country supporting Democratic candidates for Congress and hawking his second book, "The Audacity of Hope."

However, the two leading Democrats are running against history: No US senator has been elected president since John F. Kennedy in 1960.

On the Republican side, the same CNN poll showed Giuliani, who served as mayor of New York during the September 11, 2001 attacks, leading his party's nomination with 29 percent, followed closely by McCain, the senator from Arizona, with 27 percent.

Giuliani's hopes were buoyed by a WNBC/Marist poll released October 4, showing that he would beat Clinton in a head-to-head race for the US presidency.

The poll found that 49 percent of voters would back Giuliani, against 42 percent for Clinton. Nine percent were undecided.

"Democrats seem to support (Clinton) as their main candidate for president -- she's way ahead of anybody else -- and it seems like Republicans are just waiting for her to be the candidate so they can vote against her," Giuliani said in an August interview with the New York Daily News.

But Giuliani would first have to defeat McCain, a straight-talking politician whose name is often linked to the noun "maverick," for the party nomination.

"This is a wake-up call for the Republican Party," said McCain, commenting on Tuesday's results.

McCain has been in the national spotlight since 1973, when he was released after more than five years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. He unsuccessfully ran for president in 2000, losing to the current president.

If elected, McCain, now 70, would become the oldest US president to take office, beating Ronald Reagan, who was 69 when he took the job in 1981.

Democratic dark horse candidates include:

- 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry, who may have seen his hopes dashed after remarks widely seen as a slight against US troops in Iraq. Kerry apologized for what he described as a "botched joke," but the remarks were aired for days on television. Kerry was skewered by both Democrats and Republicans for the remarks.

- Former vice president and 2000 Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore, who has made warning about the effects of global warming his main cause. Gore says he is not interested in the job.

- Kerry's 2004 running mate, former senator John Edwards. The ex-senator has been heading a research center studying poverty at the University of North Carolina and has delivered speeches in states important for the nomination, such as New Hampshire and Iowa.

Other possible Republican candidates include:

- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who polled second (behind Giuliani and ahead of McCain) in a September 20 WNBC/Marist poll among Republicans. Rice seems to enjoy the speculation in interviews but has made no indication that she wants the job.

- Newt Gingrich, who led the 1994 Republican Party takeover of the House of Representatives and served as speaker. Gingrich, however, remains a divisive figure who may have little national support.

Related Links
Democracy in the 21st century at TerraDaily.com
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