By BOB HERBERT
During a post-election party at a seafood restaurant in Harlem on Tuesday night, someone in the crush of people around the veteran Congressman Charles Rangel asked if it was safe to start calling him “Mr. Chairman.” It was a little after 10:30 and a light rain was falling outside.
In Washington, Karl Rove was getting ready to more or less formally break the news to President Bush that control of the House was gone. (The two men were already sitting on the secret that Donald Rumsfeld would soon be gone, too.)
Also in Washington, Nancy Pelosi, the 66-year-old grandmother who had been portrayed as some kind of raving San Francisco radical in countless Republican campaign ads, began accepting the hugs and kisses of relatives and close friends as one Republican seat after another fell to the Democrats.
The George W. Bush era, which will ultimately be seen as a fear-induced anomaly in American history, all but breathed its last on Tuesday night.
....
Even the defeat of Harold Ford, who was vying for the seat held by the retiring Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, carried important kernels of hope for a more tolerant America. That a black candidate could mount a serious run at all in Tennessee was remarkable. A racist television ad was apparently effective in turning some voters away from Mr. Ford, but he still came within three percentage points of winning.
And there didn’t seem to be much evidence that white voters lied to pollsters about whether they would vote for Mr. Ford, a phenomenon that has occurred in other high-profile races where pre-election polls showed black candidates getting more votes than they actually tallied on Election Day.
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Bob Herbert Nancy Pelosi Harold Ford Politics News Rove Charles Rangel Election 2006 Democrats Bush Republicans Tennessee
