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Boy, Howard Dean wasn’t kidding when he said the Democratic victory was won with help from George W. Bush. From Daily Kos:

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that President Bush may have been the deciding factor that killed the GOP’s momentum in some key Senate races over the last week. One Republican consultant is convinced that Bush’s last-minute visit to Missouri on behalf of ousted GOP Sen. Jim Talent did the incumbent in. According to the network exit polls, Democrat Claire McCaskill crushed Talent among those late-breaking voters who decided in the final three days (a full 11 percent of the electorate). Bush also made a last-minute trip to Montana, where anecdotal evidence indicates the president’s rally for Republican Conrad Burns stopped the incumbent’s momentum in Billings.

Via Bob Geiger, political cartoonist Nick Anderson shows how the Democrats won.

If you’re a Republican member of Congress, the election results probably felt like a tsunami — after all, how can you squeeze the big bucks out of corporate lobbyists if you can’t guarantee that they get to write the latest legislation governing their industries? But considering just how horribly the Republicans have fouled up everything they’ve touched, I thought the voters’ rejection of the GOP should have been of more Biblical proportions — say, a hundred seats change hands in the House, eight or nine in the Senate.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow says that may become a Republican talking point:

Rove: Given the magnitude of this administration’s failures, the fact that voters were willing to vote for any Republican anywhere was actually a repudiation of the Democrats!

Bush: Snicker! Those losers!

Democrats won the Senate by only one vote, and Joe Lieberman is threatening to switch to the Republicans unless he gets his way in everything:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said yesterday that he will caucus with Senate Democrats in the new Congress, but he would not rule out switching to the Republican caucus if he starts to feel uncomfortable among Democrats.

(Say, wouldn’t it be nice right now if a couple Republican senators switched to the Democratic Party and stole Joe’s spotlight?)

Seriously, I worry. Why was the election so close? Well, cheating helped:

[T]he National Republican Congressional Committee was responsible for repetitive, often harrassing robo calls in more than two dozen districts across the country in the runup to the election.

In at least seven of those districts, the Democrat failed to unseat the incumbent by only a couple thousand votes. The NRCC’s calls may have been the difference in those races.

There’s always going to be cheating in elections. You don’t win in politics unless you win big enough to beat the cheat.

If this is the best the Democrats can do in a year when Republican failures are so inescapably clear, we’ve got a lot of work to do before 2008.

This time, the Republicans lost. Next time, Democrats have got to win.

Update: A contrary opinion — M.J. Rosenberg says the line that the voters didn’t vote for the Dems, but against Republicans is “a load of crap.”