Defining A Mandate
By Ryan Walsh (11/07/04)
Last Tuesday, 120 million voters hit the polls—the largest percentage of the population to do so since 1968. Conventional Wisdom, the only thing more amorphous, obnoxious, and incorrect than Michael Moore, said that a greater turnout would benefit the Kerry campaign. Not surprisingly, Mr. CW crashed and burned. As disheartening as it may be for former ebullient Kerry supporters, let’s survey the wreckage:
George W. Bush is the first candidate since his father in 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote. His support increased among Hispanics (seven percentage points), Jews (five points), and Catholics (four points). Compared to 2000, Bush also garnered a larger number of votes as a percentage in every state but four. And, unlike the presidential landslides of recent history, the incumbent candidate further expanded his party’s dominance in both houses of Congress—the second election-year gain in a row (Remember the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2002?).
Yet, to listen to the Beltway pundits, one might begin to think Bush didn’t win at all. Sure, he may have won the popular vote and the Electoral College, but to suggest that the election represented a national endorsement of the president’s leadership and agenda, they argue, is absurd. The electorate may have awarded Bush a mandate on Tuesday, but it is a mandate to unify, to heal the wounds of political division and factionalism, and to "bring the country together."
In essence, this school of thought contends that since Bush won 51 percent of the vote and Kerry 48, Bush must govern as though he were president 51 percent of the time and govern as though John Kerry were president for all the rest. The purely American axiom of "winner takes all" has been neutered and reduced to "winner takes only what the winner fairly receives." It’s like saying, pardon the sports cliché, that the winning team of the Super Bowl is entitled only to the percentage of its total points scored, not outright victory. In this scenario, the winners would triumphantly return to their hometown not with the much-coveted Super Bowl champion title, but with a worthless chunk of the melted-down trophy.
As the newly focused and relaxed President Bush explained in a press conference Thursday, "I earned capital on the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Bush didn’t receive a mandate from the American people to go and "negotiate" with congressional Democrats on how to reform Social Security or to implement tort, tax, and medical liability reform. He received a mandate to do precisely what he said he would do.
Take it a step further. A significant faction within the Democratic Party wishes to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq immediately, yet Bush’s agenda is to defeat the terrorist insurgents and foster a lasting atmosphere of liberty. So, in order to pull our politically polarized nation together, maybe Bush should pull out, say, half of all troops. How’s that for healing wounds?
Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor of "National Review," admits to thinking after the election in 2000 that Bush should’ve responded to the partisan division by reaching out to the opposition and governing from the middle. Then a colleague changed his mind. She pointed out to him that he had incorrectly assumed that "the country had voted for a half a Republican government." Instead, "Half the country had voted for a Republican government: a different thing."
Maybe Bush will become the quintessential lame-duck second-term president, reneging on his campaign promises and abandoning his bold vision. Yet, as Charles Krauthammer observed, "Great leaders are willing to retire unloved and unpopular as the price for great exertion. Bush appears bent on exertion."
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