… on the patio having gin and tonics

when the squall hit

— John Ashbery

Twenty four hours after America went to the polls, the results have become clearer — a substantial victory for the Republicans in the House, and in key governorships, while the Democrats retain control of the Senate in a better-than-expected result, due largely to the elevation of Tea Party candidates into Republican candidacies. The split result — including the re-election of Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid — means that the country’s leaders will have to choose between a compromise program or gridlock for the next two years.

In the House of Representatives, the Republicans have gained  60 seats, the largest single gain by a party since the Democrats regained control of the House in 1948, giving them a majority of 54, 239-185, with another 11 seats still to be decided. There were heavy losses in several key swing states such as Ohio — where they lost five districts (1, 6, 15, 16, 18), both districts of New Hampshire, Wisconsin (17, 18), and Florida (2, 8, 24).

Other traditional Republican states won by Obama in 2008 have gone entirely, with the Democrats being thrown out of three districts in Virginia (2, 5, 9), and losing two in Indiana (8 and 9). Other large losses occur in the Democratic heartland with five districts in Pennsylvania (2, 7, 8, 10, 11), and three in Illinois (11, 14, 17). The result effectively drives the Democrats out of bases in large areas of the country, restricting them to New England, the mid-east coast, the west coast, and heavy industrial areas of the north-east and Great Lakes region.

In the Senate, the Republicans captured Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Colorado remains too close to call, and will go to a recount in any case. In Alaska, write-in independent candidate Lisa Murkowski (the former Republican incumbent) may have won against Tea Partier Joe Miller, but scrutiny of all the ballots will take weeks. The Democrats had a strong defensive showing, retaining California, Connecticut, Delaware, West Virginia and Nevada.

They have most likely retained Washington State, but there will be no confirmed result for several days in that all-postal-ballot state. This leaves the final tally at Democrats 52 or 53 (including two independents), and Republicans 47 or 48 (including Murkowski). At worst for the Democrats, both Washington state and Colorado would be lost, giving them a bare 51 seats.

Key statehouse wins for the Republicans include Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Crucially, they also retained Florida in a narrow win. The Democrats won back California, with ’70s governor Jerry Brown defeating eBay billionaire Meg Whitman’s $143 million self-funded campaign. The Penn, Ohio, and Florida results are crucial, because they will not only dictate how congressional seats are “re-districted” in the bizarre institutionalised gerrymandering of the US system, but also give them control over any process of vote counting in close or disputed results in the 2012 election.

Of the hundreds of propositions on state ballots, California’s Prop 19 to legalise marijuana was defeated 55%-45%. The attempt in Colorado to define a fetus as a legal person was heavily defeated. Medical marijuana was not permitted in Oregon and South Dakota, but may win in Arizona.

The high-profile wins and losses were several, the most stunning being Senate leader Harry Reid’s victory in Nevada — made all the more remarkable by being a 51%+ win. High-profile liberal Senator Russ Feingold was defeated in Wisconsin by a 10% margin, effectively identified as a key symbol of high-spending liberalism. West Virginia Democrat senator Jim Manshin survived by running against Obama (including an ad where he shot the cap-and-trade bill), and incumbent Alaska senator Murkowski, running as an independent, appears to have defeated Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate who deposed her in the primary.

Former Florida governor Charlie Crist was not so lucky, heavily defeated by Tea Party endorsed Marco Rubio. Tom Perriello, the Democratic incumbent in the rural Virginia 5th, was defeated — he was the only House candidate President Obama had personally campaigned for, in gratitude for his strong liberal stance, despite his presence in a normally Republican district. Another Obama quasi-endorsee was luckier — former Republican, now independent Lincoln Chafee became governor of Rhode Island, after the President failed to endorse Democratic candidate Frank Caprio, who said the President could go “shove it”.

Overall, the result is obviously a triumph for the Republicans; beyond that, it a little more complex. Retaining the Senate means that the Democrats still control two of the three parts of executive and legislative government. This most likely rules out any consideration of impeachment, even as a crazy-brave strategy. It also means that there can be no clean process of trying to repeal the health-care bill, the cap-and-trade (climate change and energy) bill, and will complicate moves to extend the Bush tax cuts (which applied to people earning more than $250,000 a year), which require re-endorsement if they are not to lapse.

Were the GOP to control both houses, they could successfully run these bills through and force President Obama to veto them — in which case he becomes the great barrier to the will of the people.

Putting that fight back in the House as an intra-cameral one, makes it more complicated. The current anti-political mood in the US is such that voters will have little patience with claims by the Republican House leadership that the Senate are blocking their initiatives — many of them won’t be able to follow it anyway. The re-election of Harry Reid means that the Democratic power structure within the Senate remains intact — and Reid’s stunning victory probably wards off any internal challenges he might have faced. His victory also makes clear what his mild-mannered, even doddery demeanour obscures — that he’s a formidable fighter and campaigner.

The Republicans will thus face a cat-and-mouse game in the Senate, made all the more complicated by the presence of a Tea Party caucus in both houses.

For both sides, charting a strategic political course will be difficult, for the reason that the strong anti-Democrat margin was a product of several contradictory processes: independents switching their support from 2008, Republican-tilted independents returning to vote after sitting out 2008, and Democrat and Independent-leaning-Democrat voters sitting this one out. The independents themselves comprise two groups: those who decisively believe that Obama has gone too far to the left, those voting “anti-politically” to throw out incumbents, and those who actively want a compromise program.

Indeed the true difficulty is that many of those who have switched their vote want both a deficit reduction,and mass job creation schemes. These are many of the voters who have the Republicans wins in Ohio, Illinois and elsewhere.

Having thrown out the GOP Congress in 2006, and installed a Democratic President in 2008, out of disappointment and a desire for change, these voters are about to be disappointed again. A high-deficit job creation program would have a chance of generating US recovery; so too might a fiscally conservative one (though it would also further entrench poverty and inequality); but the one strategy which won’t do anything is the sort of middling, compromise program that will arise from this split Congress.

By 2010, America will remain stuck, and the deficit will remain substantially unreduced. Quite possibly it will rise, as the Republicans push tax cuts, while again ducking the real business of cutting spending, having ring-fenced huge departments such as Defence and Medicare.

The principal political question now becomes one of whom the public will blame more for this, and the politics of the next two years will come down to an endless game of blame-shifting. That does not bode well for Barack Obama, for the best type of politician in such circumstances is someone of low rat-cunning, the sort of person who seeks a sh-t fight, and is utterly unfazed by cant about rising above politics, or by the essential nihilism of petty, dirty politics.

That is the very opposite of the man Obama is, a judgement that is not meant as a compliment. For the moment we remain stuck with the Barack Obama of the 2008 campaign mid-period, before the September financial collapse – the candidate hopelessly outclassed by the tactical war of John McCain. What lifted him out of that hole was his masterly response to the collapse; statesmanlike, not political, strategic not tactical.

Will he get the opportunity to display that again? He has already had it, and failed it, at the start of his Presidency, when he re-installed the same old folks in the Treasury and ran the thing as business as usual — testament to the foolish hope that the seriousness of the financial crisis could be ducked. Will he get a second chance, a new crisis? Wars help, but of course he already has tow of the, bitter fag-end conflicts, all guts and blood, no glory.

Would he be so desperate and amoral to provoke an emergency — involving Iran for example? I do not, for a moment, believe he is capable of that, morally, and even if here were, I am not sure he could pull it off. His press conference today hedged best magnificently, saying that the Democrats “took a shellacking”, blaming a failure of communication, and claiming that he was never a doctrinaire big spender — all of which leaves him room to go in any number of directions. Simultaneously, no doubt, knowing the Democrats. Absent of extraordinary events, re-election will be very tough.

Furthermore, even though he might pull such off, the Republicans will not face a similar rout in 2012, no matter how discredited they are, or volatile the electorate be. For a start they are now buttressed by the return of unlimited slush money for campaigning, with the Citizens United decision closing off a brief decade in which the McCain-Feingold act had put some limit on ballooning, anonymous spending. Secondly, one of the groups that have been utterly decimated by this election is the Blue Dogs group — the 50 or so Democratic house members and a few Senators, largely in districts that vote for republican presidential candidates, who survived by running centre-right policies and votes.

Twenty-five of them have lost their seats — indeed the Blue Dogs coalition has been all but destroyed as a power group. Those seats will not return to the Democrats any time soon, especially as the very removal of the Blue Dogs will now shift the party leftwards.

That is a sweet paradox, but it is nothing compared to the bizarre result of the Tea Party in the Senate. The Democrats will control between 51 and 53 Senate seats (if there are no defections, which cannot be assumed); two of those are Delaware, where teenage witch and anti-m-sturbator Christine O’Donnell lost by 17% in a seat that a moderate Republican might have won handily, as would have a less erratic candidate than Sharron Angle in Nevada.

If Colorado goes to the Democrats, it may be because 10,000 or so voters couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a man who believes that homos-xuality is a condition like alcoholism. In Alaska, Murkowski has said she will caucus with her former Republican colleagues, but as usual for Alaskan candidates but more so, she will be open to all bids (“Senator Murkowski  announced that she would be supporting the President’s push to nationalise all heavy industry in the US”).

Should the Senate prove the bulwark that preserves enough of the first two years of the Obama Administration’s reforms for them to be entrenched, that most amazing of historical events will have come to pass — it will be the Tea Party wot done it, a thing become its opposite, the salve of the Obama era. For progressives that is sweet indeed, but it is the merest succour, the grace note of juniper in the gin, there only to more effectively bring out the deep, deep bitter.