Degringolade.

HOUSE Republicans have not lost this many seats since 1974, and Senate Republicans have probably had their worst election since 1986. Republicans lost six governorships. It was a comprehensive rout. No Democratic incumbents lost. Liberal and conservative Republicans both went down. The ballot-initiative picture was a little more mixed--Michigan banned racial preferences, and several states banned same-sex marriage--but even there, the results tilted left.

This defeat had a thousand fathers. There will be a temptation simply to blame President Bush for it, given the liberal interest in continuing to weaken him and the congressional Republicans' interest in avoiding blame. We'll get to Bush's share of responsibility in a moment. But let's not forget how many wounds the congressional GOP inflicted on itself.

Republicans lost at least 28 seats in the House. If party leaders had forced Don Sherwood, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley out in 2005 or early 2006, they would have cut that total by three and been able to spend more resources turning narrow defeats into narrow victories. Tom DeLay and Curt Weldon should have left earlier, too. In the Senate, Conrad Burns should have been forced out. Had Ohio governor Bob Taft been pressured to resign early, a number of races there might have turned out differently.

It is congressional Republicans, more than the president, who are responsible for the loss of the party's reformist credentials. Republicans were perceived not just as the party in government, but as the party of government. That perception, deadly for the relatively conservative party in our politics, was accurate. When it came to earmarks, or Social Security reform, or the Foley scandal, or lobbying reform, the Republican Congress seemed more interested in preserving its own power--or sticking with dysfunctional Hill traditions--than in the public good. The Senate inexplicably dropped the issue of judges. There will, and should, be changes in the Republican leadership now, starting with Denny Hastert's departure.

Iraq policy was obviously President Bush's major contribution to the debacle. It may very well be that even under the best of circumstances the war would have gone badly, and that one of its less important consequences would have been to hurt Republicans. But we cannot say that we have done everything possible to win it. If the short-term political pain of sending more troops to Iraq, or expanding the army, had made a difference in Iraq, it would have been worth doing, and it would have led to long-term political gains. Nor can it be said that the president has performed one of his principal wartime tasks--the maintenance of domestic will to win the war--as well as he could have. He kept to the "stay the course" mantra for far too long, and his manner of signaling American resolve was hard to distinguish from mulishness. Bush has a justified reputation for not listening to critics ...