The New Republic

The funny thing about elections is that their meaning undergoes a
metamorphosis the very instant they occur. A couple weeks before the
vote, a Republican member of Congress declared at a McCain rally,
"This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing. It's
a referendum on socialism." If you said now that the election was a
referendum on socialism, or even mere liberalism, you'd be taken
for a left-wing maniac.Political scientists will tell you that a presidential "mandate" is
just a social construct. But it's an important construct, in two
ways. Morally, it matters that the president do what the public
elected him to do--that, after all, is the point of democracy. And,
politically, the majority party would like to know whether voters
will reward or punish it for carrying out its agenda.

In reality, no president ever truly has a mandate, in the sense of
the electorate voting for him as if his entire platform were a
ballot initiative. Candidates' platforms play a role in who wins
elections, but so do economic conditions, scandals, the candidates'
personalities, and the Election Day weather in Philadelphia.

The proportion of each factor is variable, though sometimes the
broad contours can be seen. (Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide was
clearly more of an ideological affirmation than Jimmy Carter's 1976
post-Watergate squeaker.) Usually, an election's mandate-iness is
hard to pinpoint. The trick is to depict elections that your party
wins as pure policy seminars, and elections the other party wins as
fluky popularity contests.

Former evil genius (and now just evil) Karl Rove offers a nice case
study in how to play the game. "The country voted for change
Tuesday," he wrote after the election. "But the precise direction
of that change remains unclear. Mr. Obama's victory was personal
rather than philosophical." Got that? Voters just liked the
inexperienced black guy with the radical preacher, not his policy
views. Yet, just a few weeks before the vote, Rove had deemed
"people's persistent doubts concerning Mr. Obama" as one of his
liabilities. Somehow, Obama's personal reputation not only survived
but managed to propel him to victory.

Just for fun, let's recall what Rove said four years ago. George W.
Bush, remember, narrowly won by relentlessly turning the race into
a contest of personal character. A New York Times poll found that
voters favored John Kerry's stance on almost every issue, but "a
majority of Americans continue to see Mr. Kerry as an untrustworthy
politician." Bush even made one of his central themes an appeal to
voters who liked his character but didn't support his policies.
"Even when we don't agree," he'd say, "at least you know what I
believe and where I stand." Naturally, after the election Rove
insisted that Bush had won a mandate.

Both sides can play the mandate game, but Republicans seem to be
better, or maybe just more shameless, at it. In 2004, Bush
relentlessly boasted a mandate on the basis of his 2.5 percent
popular-vote margin, and news organizations like the Times, CNN,
NPR, msnbc, CBS, and many others endorsed the claim. Even in 2000,
when Bush lost the popular vote, his supporters crafted a cultural
mythology in which Republicans were regular people from the
heartland and Democrats a tiny clique of coastal elitists. This
endlessly recycled trope helped create the impression of majority
status--the political landscape, as one conservative columnist
described it, was "a sea of red for Bush with small blotches of
blue for Gore"--and helped Bush to govern as though he had a
mandate.

Unlike Bush, Obama has declined to claim a mandate, and many
Democrats have publicly said that he lacks one. And so, although
Obama nearly tripled Bush's 2004 victory margin and did so without
having to explicitly solicit the support of voters who disagreed
with the core of his agenda, the conventional wisdom has quickly
concluded that the public does not support his plans to make the
tax code more progressive, reform health care, and the like.

You can argue about how important a role Obama's platform played in
his victory. But, to read any newspaper in the days following the
election, you'd think that Obama had to start crafting his agenda
completely from scratch. "He ran on a platform to change the
country and its politics," wrote Washington Post lead political
analyst Dan Balz. "Now he must begin to spell out exactly how."
Now? I thought that by the end of the campaign even blind and deaf
hermits could tell you that Obama had a plan that could be found at
barackobama. com/plan. I've resigned myself to the fact that
political reporters don't feel compelled to familiarize themselves
with the candidates' programs in detail, but they should, at
minimum, be aware of their existence.

A related argument holds that Obama cannot carry out his plans
because the United States is a "center-right country." Newsweek
editor Jon Meacham made this case in a much-discussed cover story,
which asserted that Obama would have to move to the right or else
"pay for [his] continued liberalism at the polls." Meacham's
argument echoes the contention made by John Micklethwait and Adrian
Wooldridge in their 2004 book The Right Nation, which explains why
the United States is more conservative than other advanced
democracies.

Meacham quotes Wooldridge to support his thesis: "Is this a
center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's
obviously much more conservative." But the question isn't whether
Obama can move the United States to the left of Europe, it's
whether he can move the United States to the left of where it
currently stands.

The practical import of the Obama mandate debate has fallen on the
question of whether he should pursue his goal of comprehensive
health care reform, which numerous pundits and even some Democrats
have tagged as dangerously ambitious. But this is one area where
undiluted liberalism enjoys overwhelming public support. The
public, by a roughly two-to-one margin, thinks the government has a
responsibility to make sure that every American has adequate health
care.

Congressional Democrats fear a repeat of 1994--when, as they see it,
Bill Clinton over-interpreted his mandate and therefore failed to
pass health care reform. This reading has it backward. Clinton's
health care plan failed because Congress decided he didn't have a
mandate and refused to pass it. If the Democrats fail this time, it
will probably be because they psyched themselves out once again.

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