MARTIN WALKER INTERVIEW - Wednesday 8th November, 2006
GEORGE NEGUS: Martin, thanks for your time because I realise
it's
pretty late in the day where you are, in Washington. How do you read
the numbers at the moment? As we hear it here, the Democrats have in
fact taken the House but line ball, to say the least, in the Senate.
MARTIN WALKER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL:
That's
right. The Democrats will have a majority in the House of about 10
seats, with a total gain of about 25 seats. In the Senate, they're
going to lose winning majority by the skin of their teeth. They are
going to have, I think, 49...48, 49 seats in the Senate. If they snatch
the very last one, with a re-count in Virginia, it will be 50-50, and
at that point, Dick Cheney as the Vice-President can have the casting
vote so the Republicans will maintain control. It is going to be
divided government.
GEORGE NEGUS: There was a lot of talk, of course, in the
run-up to
these polls of a landslide, a blue wave of votes for the Democrats. Has
it been the overwhelming shift in power that people were suggesting it
might be.
MARTIN WALKER: On the numbers, no. It has been a wave but not
a tidal
wave. But what we have seen has been kind of the irresistible force of
Democratic anger and anti-Iraq anger and anti-Bushism meeting the
immovable object of the way the Republicans have engineered something
close to a permanent majority for themselves by redrawing
constituencies, by putting in strong incumbents and by putting in waves
of money. Even in places where the Democrats won, they were winning
against a tidal wave of money. In Pennsylvania, for example, the
conservative Republican, Rick Santorum, he spent $28 million, his
opponent spent $14 million, Santorum still lost. So the Republicans,
with all of this kind of in-built advantage, and a massive
get-up-the-vote operation, they really should have done better than
they did. So, in a sense, it is a testimony to the amount of anger that
there was that the Republicans have lost the control they have enjoyed
the last 12 years.
GEORGE NEGUS: They certainly got a fright. But what about the
suggestion that people like yourself and others were making in the
lead-up, that this amounted to a referendum on George W. Bush himself
and particularly the situation in Iraq?
MARTIN WALKER: I think Bush and Iraq have been the
overwhelming issues.
There have been states, there have been areas where there have been
other massive issues. Stem cell research has been the big factor in
Missouri, for example. But, yes, it has really been about Iraq. The
irony is that despite this election result, not much is going to change
in Iraq. The Democrats do not have an alternative policy. There is no
consensus in the Democratic Party, nor in the country. Like the Bush
White House, the Democrats are waiting for this report to come out from
the 'wise men' group, led by Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, to come up
with other options. But there will be no dramatic change led by the
House on Iraq policy. They're not going to withhold the money, that is
for sure.
GEORGE NEGUS: So no dramatic announcement of an exit policy
this year,
next year or whatever? You think it is business as usual so far as Iraq
is concerned, despite the antagonism towards the policy.
MARTIN WALKER: The Democrats have it in their political
interests right
now to keep the current team in office in Washington. That means to
keep Rumsfeld in place and to have him up regularly being interrogated,
being embarrassed, being shown up by Democratic congressmen in open
hearings. They would rather keep Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney in place
because that's the team they want to run against in 2008. After all,
this is the first day, right now, of the 2008 presidential campaign.
GEORGE NEGUS: That being the case, what does this result mean
to the
Democrats and people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Does this
mean that they have had to move to the right, as it were, to even get
this close?
MARTIN WALKER: It does. I mean, this is going to be a much
more
conservative Democratic Party. The new congressmen that they have got
elected that were recruited carefully by Rahm Emmanuel to appeal to
centrist, even centre-right voters they tend to be ex-military people,
they tend to be born-again religious people. Some of them wouldn't even
campaign on Sundays, they were so religious. So this is a different
kind of Democratic congressmen, congresswoman that is coming in now.
Now, for Hillary Clinton, who has won overwhelmingly - 69% of the vote
in New York - what this means for her is that her attempt to reposition
herself as a centrist has been terribly important. What this means for
Barack Obama, it is a problem. After all, the other attractive African
American candidate, Harold Ford, has been defeated in the Tennessee
race because, as always happens, people lie to pollsters about black
candidates. Black candidates always get about 5% fewer votes than the
polls say they will because people don't want to give pollsters the
impression that they might be racist. That's a problem for Barack
Obama.
The biggest single impact of this entire election, George, is going to
be nothing to do with Iraq, it's going to be on world trade. There is
now a protectionist majority in this Democratic Party in the House. The
Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation, forget it, it is over, it
is dead.
GEORGE NEGUS: Martin, roll on 2008. And that sounds like
another
interview another time to me. But thanks again.