Dickin around

Dick Morris on the election results ...
Soooo

Will Newt run in '08?

Note that Dick, despite working for Clinton, is basically conservative.
That said - he is astute reader of Washington tea leaves

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has been a disaster and the rest of the House and Senate leadership has not been any better.

The lean, ascetic, ideological purity of the Gingrich Republicans of 1994 had yielded to the corrupt, feather-your-own-nest psychology of the current Republican congressional leadership. They assumed that the partisan gerrymandering of 2000 left them invulnerable and they dipped into the till to get earmarks for their favorite lobbyists in return for contributions and free vacations. It’s time to get rid of this kind of leadership and to bring in people with a fine, tough partisan and ideological edge."

Followed by:

Oust Boehner and Blunt:

Did the Republican leadership learn anything on Election Day? Did they finally get it that voters are fed up with politicians who use their office to raise money and get perks? Will the GOP return to the lean, ascetic, committed politics that animated its 1994 surge to power or will it resist change and choose leaders who skate on the edge of corruption in their bid for privilege? And, in the Senate, will the Republicans realize that they need a mechanic who can make the trains run on time to tie the Democrats in knots?

And do the Democrats realize that their surge to the top was not due to the outpouring of true leftist believers but because centrist, moderate candidates won swing states and districts, just as Clinton did in 1996?

The answer to these questions will be apparent in the leadership elections coming soon in both houses of Congress.

In the House, Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) will try to take Dennis Hastert’s place at the head of the diminished ranks of Republicans. This is the same John Boehner who took to the House floor a few years back and distributed checks from tobacco PACs to those congressmen who put their desire for cigarette money ahead of the health of their constituents and voted against government regulation of this hideous industry. This kind of self-serving, money-focused politics is just what landed the GOP in sufficient trouble to lose the House in the first place. Letting the escalator move up one notch and inviting Boehner to head the party’s House delegation will send a clear signal that House Republicans have, like the Bourbon kings of France, in Talleyrand’s words, “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

Of course ... The Republicans went ahead with Boehner ...

Dick is no kinder on the Dems:

Ultra-liberals rise on moderate wings:

"All that has happened is that the ranking members have become the chairmen, regardless of their views or qualifications. It is a gesture of homage to seniority that would have the approval of the segregationists that used to run Congress by applying the same ground rules. Back then, no matter how loudly voters demanded integration and an end to racism, the Democratic majority kept apartheid firmly in place. The distortion of the electorate’s will taking place now on Capitol Hill is no more extreme."

So there's our results.
Republicans forgetting to put their hands back in their pockets, rather than out for "lobby bucks" and Dems mistaking the vote as mandate for left rather than middle of the road.

Then there's Newsweek :

"Hastert was never able to exercise the same iron control as DeLay. Nor was DeLay's successor as majority leader, John Boehner, able to bring real discipline to fractious House members who looked out primarily for their own political interests. The religious evangelicals became more demanding of the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, leading to the deeply unpopular spectacle of the Terri Schiavo case. Last year Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, eager to court religious conservatives for a possible presidential run, and the House leadership, sensitive to the religious right, intervened to try to keep the patient alive on a feeding tube, a questionable use of federal power, especially for a party that once stood for less government interference.

The GOP's evangelical base was shocked and demoralized this fall when Rep. Mark Foley of Florida was exposed for having sent salacious messages to congressional pages. House leaders blamed each other for not responding to warnings that Foley was a possible sexual predator. In early October, when Hastert was compelled to hold a press conference to announce that he would not step down as Speaker, it was clear that the GOP revolution was in its late Jacobin phase."