Some of you wrote in with some, shall we say, concerns about my use of the word “mandate” yesterday. With varying degrees of outrage, you explained that an incumbent who wins with 51% support and picks up a grand total of two states (maybe one) from the previous cycle can hardly lay claim to a mandate. These are perfectly legitimate concerns, so I should probably flesh this out a bit.
Four years ago, Americans were given a choice between Bush and Gore. Bush came in second, got inaugurated anyway, and immediately started governing as if he had won in a 49-state landslide. As Dick Cheney freely admitted a while back, “From the very day we walked in the building, [there was] a notion of a sort of restrained presidency because it was such a close election — that lasted maybe 30 seconds.”
This week, however, Bush won an apparent majority in a high-turnout race, while his party made gains in the House and Senate. If the election was a referendum on the incumbent, as re-election races always are, then the nation effectively — albeit narrowly — gave Bush a stamp of approval. Voters cleary shouldn’t have, and their rationale defies reality and common sense, but it happened anyway.
When I said this gives Bush a “mandate,” I meant it will give his presidency an authority and legitimacy that it lacked in his first term. I did not, however, mean that the nation has endorsed Bush’s agenda for the next four years. Indeed, throughout the campaign, Bush gave little indication of what he’d do with a second term, so there were hardly any specific policy prescriptions for the voting public to endorse.
Bush obviously didn’t win in a sweeping landslide. A 2% shift in northwestern Ohio on Tuesday and he’d be heading back to Crawford in January. That said, Bush’s relatively narrow victory, coupled by Republican gains in Congress, give the president a weight and validity that was lacking before. That’s what I meant by “mandate.” You can stop yelling at me now.