Republican Loss a Mandate Against Iraq?

On January 16, 2007 James Sawitzke, Ph.D. wrote that in November the people spoke and now George W. Bush just isn’t listening. The problem with Doctor Sawitke’s analysis isn’t that President Bush isn’t listening to his base on Iraq; President Bush isn’t listening to his base on other core matters, such as immigration and fiscal spending.

Doctor Sawitzke wrote:

WOW! President Bush has some nerve to announce to us that he will be sending more troops to Iraq. In case he hasn't heard, we had an election in November and most complicit Republicans were voted out of power in Congress. Soon afterwards, Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned.

Yet, Bush's new plan to increase troop levels in Iraq is just more of the same strategy he's been using all along. There is no justification for escalating a war when we've been on the wrong track all along.

I wholeheartedly support all efforts to challenge this escalation. If Bush feels so confident his plan is best, then sign his daughters up to be among the new troops sent. That would convince us how well he has thought this through.

We the people have thought this through. We made our voice heard in November, and if the president isn't going to listen, the Democratic Congress will.

There are other issues in Doctor Sawitzke's letter that could be addressed but for now I will confine my discusion to his analysis of the election results.

Conventional wisdom states that the November election in which the Democrats won a majority of seats in both the House and Senate was somehow a mandate for the Democrats to call the war in Iraq off. The reality is however that the November election wasn’t won by the Democrats but rather lost by the Republican’s because they ceased to listen to their base, and promoted a pro-amnesty agenda instead of reigning in illegal immigration, spent money faster than the Democrats and grew the size of government in direct contradiction to their promise to reduce the size and scope of government.

If the November election was some how a mandate to end the war, how does Doctor Sawitzke reconcile the fact that a majority of Democrats elected in November still support the war, and his party still votes to not defund the war and all but laughs at Charlie Rangel’s attempts to impose a draft?

Doctor Sawitzke may have voted in November to end the war in Iraq but the Republican’s that voted, or failed to vote in November voted to send a message to its leadership that they had had enough with the pandering for votes and fiscal irresponsibility.