It was Terri Schiavo that cooled the jets of the GOP juggernaut. It really gave moderates, who had been willing to vote for Bush in 2004 because Bush did a good job of making the case they should let him stay his course, grave doubts.

These led to the gradual, but accelerating re-examination process that ended up making America question the competence and true direction GOP leadership wanted to take this country.

Katrina was the key event because it was the anti-9/11.

9/11 supplied Bush with a billion dollars of political capital--and an aura of invincibility--because in the wake of the attacks Americans wanted desperately (and irrationally) to believe that the President would keep them safe. Just like children want to believe that Dad will keep them safe during, say, a terrifying storm.

Meanwhile, Bush was spending his new-found political capital like a drunken sailor on shore leave. But what stripped Bush of his aura of invincibility was Katrina, a terrifying storn that revealed to the American people that Bush was not competent to keep them safe.

The will to believe could not overcome the shocking reality. The American people began, painfully, to look at Bush through new eyes. And, except for the true believers, they have not liked what they have seen.

It was definitely Katrina. Not only, as MJ says, did it expose all the severe shortcomings of the Administration, but I also think, in a lot of ways, it gave people "cover" to finally admit to themselves and to others that the Bush Administration was a complete failure.

Dissent Protects Democracy.

I think Katrina contributed a great deal, but that was Bush's failure, not that of the Congress. I go by my brother-in-law, a doctor who voted Republican in 2004, but switched strongly in 2006. It was Terry Schiavo that did it. Not just Frist's blatant violation of medical ethics, but it was the Republican Congress just shamelessly shoving a completely twisted pro-life agenda down the throats of a family trying to deal with a heart-wrenching private matter. That really did it for a LOT of people.

Bush never had a true majority - it was always cobbled together from the margins with an illusion of centrism. Appearing to take moral positions that ended up interfering with our rights (while letting their friends rape the treasury and the earth with no oversight), we were all getting sick of their crap.
Finally Katrina bust open the cracks that Shiavo had revealed (watching Shep and Geraldo argue with their anchors showed the power of live tv), and a majority that had been building for 6 years finally broke through Rove's dike.

I don't think there was any single event. I think the collective we finally awoke from our 9/11 somnolence. The country finally stopped cutting Bush and the GOP slack; we came back to our senses. I think we got fed up with the lies, the spin, the incompetence, and the whole lousy mess that is the GWB presidency. Where do we go from here, is the question. The Dems need to stick to their beliefs and state those beliefs. The country, I believe, yearns for a little bit of honesty. Hopefully, a Democratic leader will emerge who will offer a fresh start, an invigoration of the old vision of tolerance, justice, personal freedom, and a government for the people. We need to return to the basic principles for which this country has stood since its founding.

Glenn (aka ges)
All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring;—J.R.R. Tolkien

Social security. It was Stalingrad, Antietam. Bush had all his "political capital": increased majorities in both houses, a compliant media, the wheels hadn't quite come off Iraq yet, and we were supposedly dazed and confused. He was fighting at his chosen time and place. And we stopped Bush cold.

Shiavo was the high water mark .... The wave may have broke in New Orleans, but it spent it's self in that Nursing Home in Fla. in Terri Shiavo's room.

We all die, we all bury our kin, No one wants Randel Terry there to supervise the proceedings. That circus cut across the whole field of American Life. It exposed these clowns like no other event.

Colorado Bob

I have to also say...definitely the feds failed and completely inept response to Katrina.  It gave Americans a whole new frame of reference to look at the failings of the Iraq War and where to correctly place the blame for the failings.

Iraq, social security, corruption, abuse of power all were part of the reason but Katrina was the proverbial "straw".

You know, one thing I have been waiting for is some serious media coverage of the Fall of the House of Bush...I mean, here we have a wartime President who got re-elected by a hair if only because of his status of a wartime leader, and then finds his support plummet in the face of his disastrous war. His party then gets trashed the next time they have to face the voters. We are literally living through an astounding period in our country's history, a time and place when the country has stopped supporting its wartime leaders, in simply mind-boggling numbers...Where is the serious media effort to convey this moment to Americans, to provide the context for what we are living through? In particular, where is the NYTimes on this? It's like this is all politics as usual when it is anything but....

-

As much as I'd like to think the debacle of Iraq or the callousness displayed to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans (Junior on-stage playing the guitar will always burn in my memory), when I talk with Republicans, they always seem to reach back to Terry Schaivo. The fact that the Commander in Chief would rush home from his "brush clearing" to sign a bill looked upon as a horrible invaision of personal rights seems to mske those "Red State" hearts pump blue. It was certainly the first time I detected a movement questioning his judgement. Something that we here have been doing all along.

Katrina

To me the defining fact leading to the quick unraveling of Rove's 1000 Year Republican New Order was the fact that after the thinnest re-election margin in a hundred years (& one stolen election), Bush & Co. clung to their arrogant "my way or the highway" attitude in all things. I suspect if they had softened enough to co-opt the democrats into some Social Sec reform we'd be in a different world right now. The inertia of Spring 05 set the stage for Katrina, the collapse of support for iraq et al.

Short answer: Dick Cheney.

The real turning point was August '05. It started with Cindy Sheehan, who generated lots of stories along the line of "Bush just wants to talk to people who tell him what he wants to here", and continued with Katrina.

Harry Frankfurt (author of On Bullshit ) has a new book out, On Truth. This is how he ends it:

How, then, can we fail to take the importance of factuality and of reality seriously? How can we fail to care about truth?

We cannot.

The change is political outlook is not due to a single (or even multiple) events, it is due to the realization that we have been (and continue to be) lied to. This reflects upon ourselves. We have trusted the regime and been made fools of. To regain our own sense of self-worth we must find new people to trust and believe. This also implies that the Dems had better deliver, and quickly, if they are not going to be lumped into the general disdain for government that affects almost half of the population.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Katrina finally woke the media up and changed the script from "steadfast leader" to "holy crap! What a f******g moron!" And the public dutyfully followed.

The congress dug their own graves by standing fast with the Prez, Delay, et al.

Everything else just accelerated the switch of the mushy middle of the electorate from Red to Blue.

The switch was only one of 10%, or so. But in our system, that's all it takes.

The Social Security issue was the first time that the Democrats in Congress pulled together as party of opposition to the President. I think we have forgotten the psychological impact of that fight which was huge at the time. Ever since it seemed the Republicans over reacted to emotional issues such as Schiavo, and floundered in their own graft and corruption in Katrina which was easily projected into the publics mind as Iraq fell apart.

Wartime? Not by any previous standard. We now have one hostile occupation in Iraq, and one under-funded, half-assed little war in Afghanistan. And the War on Terror is not a war, it is a slogan.

posted in wrong place

I think that the Foley scandal was the straw that broke the camel's back. But before that, it was a series of things; Iraq, Abramoff, Katrina. The mismanagement and poor judgement became so apparent that it could no longer be ignored.

Wellstone (above) + Rosenberg. After Schiavo the "W" mouse pads and desktop pictures of George W disappeared from the workplace in my purple state. After Katrina the Radical hangers-on stopped talking about W at all and seldom mentioned the Republican party anymore - certainly no longer in glowing tones.

sPh

I like that - it was their own imperiousness that sunk them - their fatal flaw was also their triumphing virute. "Steadfast."

"Resolute" morphed into "stubborn" then morphed into "delusional." WRT Iraq especially.

Of course some say that it was a kind of death by 1000 cuts, but then you'd never have a 'turning point' by definition.

Under-mentioned: Cindy Sheehan went round after round with Bush in August, softening him up substantially - then Katrina rolled through for the devastating knockout blow.

The Shiavo case underlines an important point: CONGRESS was voted out. Remember how Frist diagnosed Terry from a TV screen? Congress did get some blame for some of Bush's many blunders, but particularly with the Social Security debate, it became crystal clear that Congress' business was completely untethered from the concerns of real people.

Lets face it, SS 'personal accounts" was simply going to be a giveaway to the finance industry just as the drug bill was Bush's present to pharma. I also love the "me generation" aspect of the plan:

"For people retiring soon (BOOMERS) you will not have to give your SS taxes to Wall Street - of course gen Xers will be mercilessly and ruthlessly shaken down by the moneychangers - and for that privilege they'll be given no retirement security. At least they'll pay for OUR retirment security..."

* 2004 Tipping Point; Osama video. Never underestimate the power of fear. Elections are often a contest between fear and hope. Osama video helped fear win over hope.

* 2006 Tipping Point; Iraq. Sure Iraq quaqmire was there in 2004 but people still had hopes that it could be turned around. By 2006 it became clear to all but the Neocon Bush Cultists that Bush was an incompetent president and his series of blunders had made the war unwinnable.

Interesting. No mention of the fact that seniors and pensioners are having a horrible time getting the medicine they were used to getting.

I made this call back in January when they first unrolled that Part D fiasco.

That was a huge event that mostly went unnoticed by most people. Although it did produce some truly memorable stories, during the few weeks that the media cared to report it:

On the seventh day of the new Medicare drug benefit, Stephen Starnes began hearing voices again, ominous voices, and he started to beg for the medications he had been taking for 10 years. But his pharmacy could not get approval from his Medicare drug plan, so Mr. Starnes was admitted to a hospital here for treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.
-NY Times: Medicare Woes Take High Toll on Mentally Ill

Duplicate

I agree: Katrina.  That was the first time the conservative commentators on cable news were willing to be loudly critical of the president.  And once they started singing that chorus, it made it OK for their moderate/conservative viewers to think along the same lines.

I would say the failed Social Security initiative runs Katrina a close second.  That was the first signal that Karl Rove and the other politicos in the Bush administration maybe weren't the strategic geniuses they had been made to seem.  Democrats were emboldened (somewhat) by the blood in the water.  

I see many people mentioning Schiavo.  I do agree that Schiavo was a tipping point and a defining moment...but one for the republican controlled Congress rather than the POTUS.  Josh seems to be asking more about the president's tipping point.

I think the exact moment of when the proverbial straw finally broke the camel's back can be pinpointed to when Bush uttered "You're doing a helluva job Brownie" while the people NOLA were forsaken and drowning.  Upon hearing that everyone looked up to the dais and realized the emperor really had no clothes...

All those other things had piled up, but Katrina was the wave that overtopped the levees.

Republicans I know, people who have always voted Republican did not vote for Bush. They voted for a Republican who just happened to be George W. Bush. (They have never voted for a Democrat, and probably never will.)

They are not disenchanted - nor were they necessarily ever enchanted - with Bush because of his monumental screw-ups, obvious ineptness or disastrous ventures but because his policies defy the principles of Republicanism as they understand them. Whenever he attempts to, say, "reform" social security or eliminate the estate tax, issues close to a country-club republican's heart, he fails.

How they would poll? Probably depends on the questions asked. In private conversations one doesn't mention Bush because the reaction is as though one has mentioned one of their children who has disastrously strayed.

Complex causation, of course. I think Katrina opened some eyes, Schiavo opened more eyes and not a few minds, and once the eyes and minds were opened, issues which formerly worked for the Purse-Lipped Preznit began to be seen as two-edged swords-- (Iraq, tax cuts for the rich and concentration of wealth, privatization, etc.). Thus began a slow hemorrhage of suppport for Bush and the Republicans, which accelerated as Iraq continued south and other disappointments mounted.

And FoleyGate exploded at just the right time, a smart-bomb targeted at those who (their denial reinforced by organized religious homophobic pirates) remained behind the Republicans as a party.

The deeper the delusion, the harder it is to shake. It has taken Americans six years to see the Lying, Purse-Lipped Sack o' Shyt for what he is.

What is he? Bush is the new O.J.

i'm surprised not one person has brought up the dubai port sale dust-up. i believe this event is as strong a candidate as any other, even though in the end, i'd give the contest to katrina.

but what happened with dubai was nothing less the lobbing of a cognitive grenade at the red-meat eating faithful base of bush's popular support.

clearly the port deal was not intended for public consumption. since a number of our port affairs are already handled by foreigners, the administration obviously did not expect its supporters to suddenly notice or care, and were wholly unprepared to deal with the blowback from such attention — blowback they set themselves up for after five years of stoking their supporters' jingoism and xenophobia.

bush asked the public to accept — in the public's view — the handing over of our ports to the very same people they had been steadily conditioned for years to vilify. if anyone remembers, for example, some of the viewer feedback cnn's jack cafferty delivered over the air, the reaction was shockingly feral.

Remember the deadline for registration for those who wanted bankruptcy protection?

And remember the deadline for enrolling in Part D? They threatened seniors that they'd better enroll by May 15 or face stiff premiums for the rest of their lives. It was a shakedown, a dare to all seniors to get involved in the whole disaster or else. Their biggest problem in 2005 and on was that they forgot they had no mandate. They adopted policy positions widely out of line with the expectations of voters, and proceeded to shake down huge sections of the public as if we all love being pickpocketed.

Right after the 2004 election, the attitude of the whole Republican Party changed into one of ha ha, we've got it now, you can't take it from us, we've got you all screwed now. The first thing they did was launch a full scale transparent assault to "save" Social Security. Then they had their widely hated signature achievements, like the bankruptcy bill and Medicare Part D. They just lazily dropped all pretense that they had anything but the most ill of intentions, that they were in this for anything other than enriching themselves and their friends.

One thing that must be noted- there are some issues that have not only succeeded in causing widespread public revulsion, but also, really served to show everybody how divorced the Bush true-believers are from reality. The Republicans, forgetting their lack of a mandate, not only took extreme minority positions on these issues, but also vilified anyone who in fact had a majority opinion.

Iraq: The obvious case, with a competition between the "reality-based" view and the idea that everything is hunky dorey except for insurgents who can be killed and bad PR that can be fixed. Essentially the public was told it couldn't see the nose on its face in the mirror, everything was fine with the painted schools. Once the public noticed the daily car bombings, the deaths of soldiers, and Rumsfeld's general incompetence, they gradually departed from that viewpoint. Many many Republicans failed to follow along, and you can still see them defending the "surge" today- a position with something like 10% support among the public.

Katrina: Remember how this quickly, but only briefly (for most of us), turned into a law enforcement issue? Once those initial reports of looting came out, the wingnuts kept struggling to move the conversation away from Bush's inaction to make it more about the lawlessness in the city. And the public perception of the crisis turned on a dime- until later on when it became clear (to most of us) that the looting was the minor story. (But of course, it must be mentioned that the looting was what it took to finally attract significant attention from Bush.) But for months afterward the Wingnut Brigade's narrative of Katrina was a law-enforcement issue, and political attacks on New Orleans residents continue to this day. The worst are Bush supporters who also got rained on and feel entitled to be racists. If you notice, in almost every case, this minority wingnut opinion views individuals as the cause of all our problems, rather than corporations or the pernicious, corrosive effect of money and corruption in politics.

Schiavo: The most obvious case. This one really was a big F U to the public: we can survive with just our crazy base thank you. Most people were horrified by government intervention in a family's private affairs and failed to view the story in pro-life/pro-choice terms like the Republicans myopically insisted on doing. They even lost libertarians with this one, who are some of their most annoyingly persistent supporters.

Bankruptcy Bill: This got turned into a moral issue too. People who don't pay their bills are bad and should be punished. That was the moral clarity we kept getting. But although nobody likes deadbeats, most people view the Republican bankruptcy legislation as a direct affront to themselves. After all it closes off an option that was previously available to you in the event of a financial emergency. That isn't changed by the fact that some deadbeats out there are already getting their comeuppance.

I don’t think that it was one thing nor could it have been just one thing… All of these minor fubars in series contributed to their slide. There is a military strategy (a term that I can’t remember at the moment) that strives to make significant events happen to an enemy at a pace that is faster than the enemy’s ability to successfully react. I believe that that is what happened to this administration. Part of it was external, part of it was internal and part of it was bad luck. But, I think that the biggest problem was that they created a communication structure that fed upon itself without adequate input from the ‘reality based’ world. This had the effect of delaying and therefore weakening their ability to control the story. Then once they had spun up a response to the first crisis the next crisis was on their doorstep. Combine this scenario with the increase in the efficiency of their opponents in the ‘reality based’ world (bloggers et al) and you have the makings of a perfect storm.

I think I'm with Digby on this: the Duelfer Report was the beginning of the Great UnMasking -- the rest that followed just drove the wedges farther into the chinks it opened. It left only Santorum/King-style TruBe* nutcases clinging to the notion that the WMD claim was ever anything but bogus. And it made it ok for those who had long resisted the notion that their president and his admin would deliberately and baldly lie to them to join us in the Reality-Based Community who had long previously realized that yes, they would and did and do; and that they do so as a conscious, pervasive, systematic tactical political choice. Just a snowball rolling downhill (though with lots of helpful pushes from Repub corruption, incompetence and idiocies like the Schiavo mess).

*True Believer

The "tipping point" was Katrina, hands down. It put a human face on the suffering that has been caused by Bush's incompetence, which was graphically embodied in the cronyism that yielded Mike "Heckuva job, Brownie" Brown.

That in turn gave the MSM permission to view the debacle in Iraq with the benefit of objectivity, rather than taking refuge under the guise of purporting to offer balanced coverage.

J. McCutchen

A friend or perhaps now EX friend is a county Republican chair. After the 2004 election, he told me (paraphrase)

When will you Democrats ever learn? Americans are strong for decency and strong for defense. We will rule forever.

What happened Mr Chairman?

Exactly what I said in response

Hubris. Iraq
Iraq. Hubris

Remember, the media "common wisdom" before Katrina was that the problems were difficult, but the Republicans were handling it as well as possible.

Prior to that, and still through today, the media common wisdom is that Democrats cannot lead, cannot handle war or terrorism, are rubes who do not know how to dress in sophisticated company and were graft-ridden crooks. Katrina was the case when the reporters on the ground were arguing with their anchors. That was the real crack for the Republicans, but they could have recovered it if they had given the media anything at all to work with. But they didn't. Everything since Katrina had been downhill. The MSM common wisdom hasn't changed, but nothing the Republicans have done since Katrina has been a success. It has all been unredeemed failure.

Then from the bowels of the MSM, Bob Woodward published his book entitled "State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III." Just the title crystalized all the other books describing the failures of the Bush administration and gave them legitimacy. It broke the hold of the MSM common wisdom on the public. (I don't think it has changed the common wisdom. It just broke the MSM monopoly on "Truth.")

The result was the November 7th election which was effectively a vote of no confidence in Bush and the Republican Party. Unfortunately, since we do not have a Parliamentary government, instead of getting a new government, PM and cabinet, all we got was Bob Gates to replace Don Rumsfeld. Like everything else in the Bush administration, that's a cosmetic change. Although we are likely to see a real shift in the domestic legislation very shortly.

I will also agree that Terry Schiavo was a critical incident. It showed that the social Republicans commanded the administration and was a severe danger to everyone who is likely to die and wants to maintain control over the process. The extremists were too visible for their own good, and everyone was threatened.

Then there was the Chinese water torture of corruption, starting with the arrest and conviction of "Duke" Cunningham, followed by Abramoff who was able to bring corruption, bribery, murder, corproate takeovers, and that great picture of him walking out of the federal court building wearing the black trenchcoat and the black hat. I'd be willing to bet that picture alone cost the Republicans thousands of votes nation-wide.

Anyway, that's my current take on the situation. I have to admit that when Josh posted the question, I looked at it and checked for comments. There were none. And I had no way of putting all the events of the last two years into perspective without a blackboard and a list of the events, which I wasn't ready to do. So this post is really my idiosyntric take on all the posts above, and I am still hazy as to the sequence of the events. Was Schiavo before Katrina? Seems like it, but I'm not sure.

Edward Keating
All of the above... Katrina , the war in Iraq, the Abramof scandals... all caused the Republican ship to list and their eventual loss, but if the question were one of magnitude and what caused the highly improbable loss of the Senate, the answer would have to be the Tom Foley-page scandal.

At the time the Foley scandal broke, Bush and Cheney (Rove) were back to the tried and true tactics of attacking the Democrats' patriotism by slinging the biggest lie they could think of, equating a vote for the Democrats as a vote for the terrorists, and their efforts were beginning to show some positive results. Bush's and the Republicans' numbers were slowly beginning to make a modest comeback from their record-low levels, and while their chances of holding onto the House were still a long shot, they stood a decent chance of keeping their losses to a minimum and the maintaining the possibility of post-election, propaganda victory by keeping their losses below the averages for an party in power in a mid-year election. Up to this point, even the most optimistic Democrats and the brashest pundits were unwilling to predict a Democratic take-over of the Senate. Then the Foley scandal broke. In the most dramatically timed news stories that I can ever remember, the Republicans were stopped dead in their tracks and their end-game strategy, which had just begun to show some positive results, was over. Not only was a partial comeback over, but they eventually sunk even further in the polls and, as they say, the rest is history.

For reasons too difficult (and depressing) to contemplate, many Americans, in the face of gross corruption and incompetence, continued to look the other way and kept the election unnaturally close. The Democrats were, for some inexplicable reason, (lack of courage, perhaps) still unworthy of being handed the power to run Washington. But, now, things had changed and there was no looking back. People who had been able to look past Iraq, past Katrina, and past Abramof, could no longer deny that the Republicans time was over and that they just had to go. Anything , even Democratic control, would be preferable to any kind of Republican hold on power. These people who would put their own political concerns over the welfare of congressional pages in their charge had finally gone too far. The margins of victory in just two or three states were so slim, that just the tiniest of fractions of the vote in any one of those states would have allowed the Republicans to prevail in terms of control of the Senate. The Democratic victory in the House was never really in doubt, but the Foley scandal added at least four of five more state to the Democratic column.

If there was one last nail to the Republican coffin, it would have to be Rush Limbaugh's criticisms of Michael J. Fox and his accusations that he had been faking or exaggerating the symptoms of his Parkinson's disease. With the stem cell issue on the ballot in Missouri, the backlash against the right-wing attack machine was enough to rally Missouri voters to Clair McCaskill and what could have been an easy victory for James Talent turned into a 2% margin of victory for the Democrat.

Full leverage for the turning point came when Keith Obermann began doing his "special commentaries," the first one originated from ground zero on the anniversary of 9/11.