On the day after Election 2006, I was walking down Broadway on Seattle's Capitol Hill. A brief break in the clouds permitted the sun to shine through and give us a respite from the constant rains. People were out on the streets doing their errands, buying their coffee, and chatting merrily with each other. There was an air of excitement on the street, euphoria, even joy. Faces were beaming. Conversation was animated. The atmosphere was so positive even the parking meters were smiling.

The reason for all the happiness? On election day we executed a regime change. Iraq is not the only or even the major issue that turned American voters away from the Republicans. Exit polling and closer analysis reveal a much deeper and broader discontent. Over 40% of voters polled said they were disgusted at the culture of corruption fostered by the Republican majority. Abramoff, Ney, Cunningham, DeLay, Boehner, Scanlon--and those are just the indicted and convicted Republicans. Then there are the corrupt big businesses like Halliburton, Enron, Worldcom, Wallmart, big pharmaceuticals that financed them while cheating investors and workers. Corporate CEOs looted billions from their companies--hauling away 400 times the average worker's wage--before finally being caught and sent to jail. Yet they only represent a small fraction of the robber barons who even today are fattening their wallets while US soldiers go into battle without armor.

Americans were also disgusted by the culture of lies and coverups perpetrated by this administration. Cheney refused a court order to reveal the names of lobbyists and corporate interests that crafted his energy policy. Alaska senator Ted Stevens refused to have oil executives put under oath to testify before Congress even as they were gouging Americans at the gas pump. Dennis Hastert, Republican Speaker of the House, covered up the Mark Foley scandal. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby lied about outing a CIA agent. President Bush himself was caught in lies about weapons of mass destruction that never existed, missions accomplished that weren't, and a "stay the course" doctrine that even he abandoned.

Then there was the moral collapse of the evangelicals. First came the Mark Foley scandal--a pedophile Republican chasing after teenaged pages. Then Ted Haggard, leader of the right wing evangelical council who bragged about his weekly briefings with President Bush, was caught with his pants down buying meth and sex from a homosexual prostitute. Right wing propagandist Rush Limbaugh was caught buying illegal drugs to feed his habit. The final straw was the revelation in David Kuo's book that Bush/Cheney/Rove insiders privately mocked the evangelicals whom they publicly courted. Polls show over 30% of the white male base of the evangelicals switched their votes to Democrats in this election.

"Staying off-course" was not the only reason for the massive Republican defeat, to be sure. Democrats, smarting from their own blindness in 2004 executed a regime change within their party. They put aside the fossilized leadership in the Democratic National Committee and put Howard Dean in charge. He drove his 50-state strategy with new energy and vigor. The Democrats fielded new candidates who had closer ties to their neighborhoods, like gun-toting, plain-talking farmer Jon Tester of Montana. They got out of their urban enclaves and worked the rural towns like Claire McCaskill in Missouri. Many of the victorious Democrats were not old party hacks or ivory tower intellectuals. They were down-home folks that knew their neighbors and talked their language.

Summing up all these factors still only brushes the surface of a deeper reason for the huge regime change of 2006. When Republicans mortgaged their party to the right wing evangelicals in the 1990s, they tried to tap into the energy of American values for political gain. They caught the Democrats off guard. The Dems were living in the past, pitching their tired old message about jobs and welfare to an aging Depression era constituency. The Republicans executed a regime change in 1994 with a new message of "god, gays, and guns" which appealed to a narrow but virulent minority of dedicated evangelicals. The god, gays, and guns message stirred up a mean-spirited monster which began to ravage America instead of making it a better country. It polarized our people because it is too narrow an agenda to encompass the broader, deeper, and more wholesome spectrum of American values. Besides, as we have seen, neither the Republicans nor the evangelicals managed to live up to their god's commands, keep gays out of their shorts, or account for all the guns they sent to Iraq.

So here we are. We are still cleaning up after Katrina, Wall Street's gains are still not reaching the majority of middle Americans, 11 million immigrants still do not have a home, we are lost in Iraq, and North Korea has the bomb. In spite of all these failures, however, Americans were happier on the day after the elections. We voted our values and we executed a regime change. We took our government back. It will not be a perfect government and it will make mistakes. Nevertheless it is a chastised government. It will no longer be so arrogantly "go-it-alone" cocksure of itself. It will no longer be able to prop itself up solely on rumors, fear, and terror.

The new Democratic Congress has a clear mandate from the people. We changed the regime. Now they have to steer a new course. --Janice Van Cleve. Copyright 2006.