{"id":8805,"date":"2006-10-19T12:31:09","date_gmt":"2006-10-19T16:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8805.html"},"modified":"2006-10-19T12:31:09","modified_gmt":"2006-10-19T16:31:09","slug":"mandate-schmandate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/mandate-schmandate\/","title":{"rendered":"Mandate, schmandate"},"content":{"rendered":"

TNR’s Michael Crowley noted<\/a> today that Republicans are already trying to preemptively spin Democratic election victories, insisting that the Dems’ success will come without a mandate. From the far-right Washington Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“If the Democrats win, it will have all the elements of a Forrest Gump victory. In other words, things swirling around them over which they were barely aware,” independent pollster John Zogby said, referring to the slow-thinking movie character who always succeeded, but without any grand design in mind.<\/p>\n

“There will not be a proactive agenda that wins this for them. I don’t know if the electorate sees the Democrats as having an alternative to the Bush plan. They’ve put it out, but the party’s leadership hasn’t led with it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Three points. First, I’ll concede that the winds may be at the Democrats’ backs this year, but most of that is a result of public disgust and disappointment with the GOP. Dems are clearly more popular than in previous years, but that’s probably because Republicans are doing such a bang-up job of making us look good.<\/p>\n

Second, it’s true that the Dems’ policy agenda hasn’t gotten much in the way of ink, but does that really matter? As Tim Grieve noted<\/a>, in the run-up to the 1994 elections, less than a third of the country have even heard of the Contract with America, and far fewer actually liked its tenets. It didn’t much matter. People wanted a change, so they voted for one.<\/p>\n

And third, does the right really want to debate the merits of governing with a mandate? If memory serves, their guy came in second in a presidential election and governed as if he’d won 48 states. If Dems take control of Congress, questions about whether the party has a mandate will be laughable.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean we won’t hear them, of course, but they’ll be pretty ridiculous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TNR’s Michael Crowley noted today that Republicans are already trying to preemptively spin Democratic election victories, insisting that the Dems’ success will come without a mandate. From the far-right Washington Times: “If the Democrats win, it will have all the elements of a Forrest Gump victory. In other words, things swirling around them over which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}