Editor's Page

Containment or rollback? Of the Republicans, I mean—not communism in the 1950s. It is a question about the (happy) results of the midterm elections. Were they just a vote against George W Bush or do they represent a decisive shift in the orientation of Americans? Has conservatism been contained or has the American center, which moved right in recent decades, shifted ground? In one way, it doesn't matter. Bush's Washington gave us the Baghdad Botch, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the Katrina Calamity, disinvestment in America's future (aka "tax relief" for the top percentiles), an effort to privatize Social Security, a pharmaceutical reform that is the Medicare equivalent to three-card monte, and non-treatment of our ailing health care system. So voters opted for Democratic checks—both the reality and institutional kinds—on Republican governance.