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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/u...&en=90b2a0d9c77157ea&ei=5094&partner=homepage
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/u...&en=90b2a0d9c77157ea&ei=5094&partner=homepage
nytimes said:November 8, 2006
Rumsfeld Resigns as Defense Secretary After Big Election Gains for Democrats
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JIM RUTENBERG
ELECT lede
WASHINGTON — Faced with the collapse of his Republican majority in Congress, President Bush responded swiftlytoday by announcing the departure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and vowing to work with Democrats ‘’to find common ground” on the war in Iraq and domestic issues.
With Democrats having recaptured the House and control of the Senate hinging on the outcome of a single unsettled contest in Virginia, Mr. Bush, sounding alternately testy and conciliatory at a White House news conference, said he was “obviously disappointed.” He portrayed the results as a cumulative “thumpin’ ” of Republicans, and conceded that as head of the party, he bore some responsibility.
Just days after telling reporters that he would keep Mr. Rumsfeld on for the rest of his term, Mr. Bush said that the two had agreed “after a series of thoughtful conversations” that it was time for Mr. Rumsfeld, a magnet for criticism about management of the war, to go. Senior White House officials said the move had been planned for weeks, but the timing of the announcement left no doubt that Mr. Bush wanted to make a dramatic demonstration of flexibility in dealing with a war that has come to define his presidency.
The president asked Robert M. Gates, who served as director of central intelligence under Mr. Bush’s father, to take over at the Pentagon at a moment when the administration is under intense pressure to develop a new approach in Iraq. The White House said it had not yet determined whether to ask the outgoing Republican-controlled Senate to take up the nomination or to wait for the new, possibly Democratic-controlled Senate to take it up next year.
Tuesday’s vote reshaped the political landscape in Washington just two years after Mr. Bush won re-election and declared that he intended to expend the political capital he had amassed on behalf of an ambitious agenda.
While members of both parties said the election was about the war as much as anything, Republicans opened a debate about whether they had been also been undone by failing to stick closely enough to conservative principles. Republicans in the House moved toward overhauling their leadership, and presidential contenders in both parties began preparing for an almost immediate start to the 2008 campaign.
Democrats picked up at least 28 seats in the House, putting them in control of that chamber for the first time in 12 years.
By mid-day today, Democrats had won one of the two Senate races that had been left undecided overnight, claiming a seat in Montana from the incumbent Republican, Conrad Burns. But there was still no resolution in Virginia, where the Democrat, James Webb, held a lead of less than one-half of one percent of the 2.3 million votes cast over the Republican incumbent, Senator George Allen.
Republicans huddled through the day, debating whether to start down the road to a recount in Virginia, a step that had the potential to delay the declaration of the winner for weeks. An advisor to Mr. Allen said he was likely to concede if a canvass of counties now underway does not substantially reduce the current margin of about 6,700 votes.
Democrats declared themselves confident that Mr. Webb had won, and called on Mr. Bush to prevail on Mr. Allen to concede.
After spending weeks questioning Democratic approaches to the economy and national security as dangerous for the nation, Mr. Bush said he recognized “that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress” in Iraq. He said he intended to ‘’work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way” and invited leading Democrats to meet with him at the White House beginning Thursday.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is now expected to become the first female speaker of the House, said Mr. Bush had invited her to lunch, calling her “madam speaker-elect.”
Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who spearheaded his party’s campaign to take back the Senate, said he received calls from Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, as well as the president himself. Mr. Schumer said he thought it meant the White House was serious about reaching out.
“He was gracious,” the senator said of Mr. Bush. “He said, ‘You did an amazing job, congratulations. He said, ‘I wish you were on my team. And I said, ‘No you don’t, Mr. President.’ ” In the Capitol, Ms. Pelosi vowed to use the first 100 hours of the new Congress to push through what Democrats dubbed their “six for ‘06” agenda.
That program includes calls to raise the minimum wage, repeal both subsidies for oil companies and incentives for companies to send jobs overseas, cut interest rates on student loans, give the government authority to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower prescription drug prices, and expand opportunities for embryonic stem cell research. On at least one of those issues, the minimum wage, Mr. Bush signaled there was room for a deal.
But Democrats made clear that their first order of business, even before taking over in January, is pressing the Bush White House to change course in Iraq.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, called for Mr. Bush to convene a bipartisan summit on Iraq. Ms. Pelosi, apparently unaware that Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation was about to be announced, called pointedly on Mr. Bush to get rid of the secretary of defense, saying it would “signal an openness to new, fresh ideas.”
As Democrats turned their attention to governing, Republicans — including Mr. Bush — grappled with their losses. Although Mr. Bush had been insisting in public he was confident Republicans would retain control of both houses of Congress, his aides said privately today that the president knew as early as several weeks ago that Democrats would likely capture the House.
“If you look at it race by race, it was close,” the president told reporters in the East Room of the White House. “The cumulative effect, however, was not close. It was a thumpin.’ ”
Washington has been a one-party Republican town for almost the entire six years Mr. Bush has been president. Tuesday’s election ended any talk about Republicans about establishing a permanent majority in the capital, and upset a power structure that extended from Congress and the White House through the network of lobbyists, interest groups and donors that have supported Republicans and their agenda for years.
“We’re going to take a two-year hiatus,” Representative Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told reporters at a morning press briefing. Of Ms. Pelosi, he said: “My goal and job will be to make sure she never sets the record that Denny Hastert set.”
Mr. Reynolds was referring to the current speaker, Representative J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who has held the job longer than any Republican in the nation’s history. Mr. Hastert issued a statement on Tuesday saying he would not seek the role of minority leader in the new Democratic-controlled House.
In addition to upending the balance of power between the parties in Washington, Tuesday’s election also upended the power structure within the parties themselves. Two Democrats, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Representative Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania, have both said they will seek the position of majority leader.
And there has been speculation that Representative Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who is widely viewed as an architect of Tuesday’s House victory, would seek the position of Democratic whip. Mr. Emanuel said Wednesday he had not made any decision about the whip’s race, but would do so “in short order.”
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Bush gathered his senior aides — Mr. Rove; Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president — in the Oval Office before 7:00 this morning to assess the new power structure on Capitol Hill.
Although the White House had been insisting for weeks it was not planning for a Democratic takeover, a small cadre of presidential advisers, including Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Bolten and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, had already been doing just that.
“We got thumped, it’s time, let’s go,” Mr. Bush said, according to one person who was present at the early morning meeting. “Let’s get them on the phone, is it too early?”
Aides to Mr. Bush said they wanted to make some fast and dramatic moves to signal they were nimble in the face of the new challenge and to seize at least some of the stage on a day that belonged to Democrats. At the same time, they said, they wanted to deprive Democrats of any further opportunity to score political points by attacking Mr. Rumsfeld.
And they said Mr. Gates was someone the president had always been comfortable with; Mr. Bush considered him for the position of director of intelligence, now held by John Negroponte.
Mr. Bush and the president met clandestinely on Sunday at Mr. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex.; to avoid the prying eyes of reporters and low-level White House officials who were camped out in nearby Waco, Mr. Gates met senior aides to Mr. Bush in the little town of McGregor, and was then spirited into the ranch, aides said.
Mr. Gates, the president of Texas A&M University, had a difficult confirmation as director of central intelligence 15 years ago because of accusations that he had slanted intelligence. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, pledged to give Mr. Gates “a fair and fresh look,” although he had voted against his confirmation in 1991.
Despite the pronouncements of bipartisanship on both sides, there were questions about how Mr. Bush would work with a party whose Senate leader, Mr. Reid, has lambasted him as “a liar,” and whose House leader, Ms. Pelosi, has called him “incompetent.”
After weeks of slamming Democrats as wrong on Iraq, Mr. Bush struck a softer tone. “I truly believe that Congresswoman Pelosi and Harry Reid care just about as much — they care about the security of this country, like I do,” he said.
Still, there were signs of tension. Asked in an interview on ABC News about her comments that Mr. Bush was incompetent, Ms. Pelosi replied, “Incompetence in the face of a war is dangerous,” but she quickly added it was time to move past old conflicts.
Mr. Bush, meanwhile, was asked at his news conference how he could have been so hopeful of Republican victory in the face of polls predicting such serious losses. His answer seemed to reflect an irritation not with Republican candidates or strategists, but the public.
“I thought when it was all said and done, the American people would understand the importance of taxes and the importance of security,” the president said. “But the people have spoken, and now it’s time for us to move on.”
