THUMP.(The Talk of the Town)

Interviewing President Bush aboard Air Force One a few days before his second inauguration, a Washington Post reporter noted that American forces in Iraq had neither been welcomed as liberators nor found any of the promised weapons of mass destruction. "The postwar process hasn't gone as well as some had hoped," the reporter ventured. "Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?" The President's reply--as iconically Bushian as "Bring 'em on"--came to mind last Tuesday night as the big blue waves started rolling in. "Well," he said back then, "we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

Actually, it was more like an impunity moment. "Let me put it to you this way," Bush had said the day after John Kerry's concession. "I earned capital in the campaign--political capital--and now I intend to spend it." And spend it he did. Whatever he had left over after he blew a wad trying to turn Social Security into a bonanza for the financial-services industry was squandered on an unending skein of assurances that the war in Iraq was going fine. By last week, the coffers were empty, and not even the hurried-up sentencing of Saddam Hussein to be hanged by the neck until dead could refill them. The accountability moment had arrived at last.

Americans have had enough, and their disgust with the Administration and its congressional enablers turned out to be so powerful that even the battered, rusty, sound-bit, TV-spotted, Die-bolded old seismograph of an American midterm election was able to register it. Thanks to the computer-aided gerrymandering that is the only truly modern feature of our electoral machinery, the number of seats that changed hands was not particularly high by historical standards. Voters--actual people--are a truer measure of the swing's magnitude. In 2000, the last time this year's thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore's: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million.

This election was a crushing rebuke to Bush and his party. The rest is interpretation. Nearly everyone agreed that public anger about the Iraq catastrophe was paramount. To the surprise of much of the political class, exit polls suggested that corruption was almost as formidable a factor, especially among Independents and disaffected Republicans. On the right, some commentators complained that the G.O.P.'s problem was that it hadn't been conservative enough: too much spending, too much nation-building, too much foot-dragging on abortion and the like. Others took comfort in the hypothesis that, because a number of Tuesday's new faces are Democrats of a (relatively) conservative stripe, the election was actually a victory for the ideology, if not the party, of George W. Bush. In a blog post titled "All's Well on the Conservative Front," Lawrence Kudlow, of National Review, pointed to the "conservative Blue Dog Dems who won a whole bunch of seats" as proof that "Republicans may have lost--but the conservative ascendancy is still alive and well."

Maybe. Or maybe those Blue Dogs won't hunt. In truth, the great majority of Capitol Hill's new Democrats will be what used to be called liberals, and in every case Tuesday's Republican losers were more conservative than the Democrats who beat them. Moreover, the fate of ballot ...