I'm Not Going to Pay Too Much For This Mandate!

Last Thursday I argued that Bush could not claim a mandate for policies that he had either not campaigned on and knows are unpopularor explicitly denied. This week the point seems to have caught on that it is not Bush's 51% that denies him a mandate, but the fact that he chose to campaign exclusively on denigrating and destroying Kerry, a risk most presidents running for reelection would not take. The political scientists Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker put the argument most persuasively in the New Republic this week. I have no doubt that Bill Clinton had more of a mandate for the course of his presidency with 49% in 1996, or even, as I argued last week, that Bush might have even had more of a mandate in 2000, when he was more specific about what he intended to do, such as to "be a uniter not a divider," although he did none of those things.

So it's not the percentage that matters, but in thinking further about the percentage -- 51 or 52% of the vote, and a real election-day scare -- I began thinking about the degree to which it in fact may be a deliberate strategy, in many ways a brilliant one. I've noted in the past the tendency in Republican congressional politics, particularly in the House, to take pride in slipping something through with the bare minimum number of votes. The last tax cut bill was an example.

That this is the congressional strategy has begun to seem clear to me, although it's a radical innovation. Hastert and DeLay's insight seems to be that a bill that gets 218 votes in the House is just as much the law as one that gets 430. And for every vote they add on to the necessary minimum majority, they might have to compromise in some unnecessary way, whether with Democrats or their own fiscal conservatives. In other words, they see every vote over a bare majority as the equivalent of leaving money on the table or overbidding in an auction.

I'm sure there is a whole body of political science literature on this question, and the rational choice model that dominates the field would probably predict exactly this behavior. But in practice, it's highly unusual. Usually legislators would prefer to get 60 or 70% of the votes than 50%+1. It's a personal affirmation, it's a margin of error, it's an insurance policy against efforts to block or repeal the legislation later. And they are in the business of negotiating. They like to wheel and deal. If a piece of legislation is moving forward and some member wants to vote for it but wants some little change or a favor later -- why not? And usually the price of extra votes isn't too high; the cost of getting to 50%+1 is often much higher. But the current congressional leadership -- perhaps responding to the White House -- seems to favor instead taking the most polarized position, as long as their side is the one that gets slightly over half the votes instead of slightly under.

Is it possible that Bush and Rove took the same approach to the election? If so, it's an astonishing innovation. A president running for a second term would always be presumed to want a big, affirming majority. Nixon did, Reagan did (both got it), Clinton did. Is it possible that Bush didn't?

There's plenty of reason to think so. The basic narrative of the Bush first term is that described by E. J. Dionne in Stand Up, Fight Back: He had two chances to be a unifying, popular president: by being conciliatory after the contested election, and certainly after 9/11. Twice he squandered that opportunity. His descent from 91% approval to 51% election was largely by choice: a choice to stake everything on Iraq, a choice to polarize Congress, a choice to embrace divisive social issues, a choice to conduct a negative campaign. Unlike his father, who was undone by a truly failing economy, or Jimmy Carter who was undone by a failing economy and a helicopter crash in the Persian desert, there is really no external factor in Bush's decline. Of course he would never have stayed at 91%, but it is easy to imagine a set of choices that a president in Bush's position could have taken that would have all but guaranteed him a reelection on the scale of Reagan in 1984, with a vast majority of electoral votes.

It's possible, I suppose, that the decision to invade Iraq foreclosed this possibility. That is, once he let his presidency be hostage to the entirely predictable chaos of that country, the only way to survive was by thoroughly discrediting his opponent. I'm not sure, though. As recently as the late spring, it looked possible that Iraq could have calmed down -- or at any rate, Bush hoped so. Well before that, they decided on an approach to campaigning that was based entirely on discrediting Kerry sufficiently that he could win just a majority. And he could have handled Iraq in a way that would have been less polarizing in the U.S. -- asking for sacrifice, admitting mistakes, responding with authentic outrage to Abu Ghraib and other outrages.

For at least two years, Rove, Ken Mehlman, Matthew Dowd and others were predicting that the election would be close but Bush would win. Why? Doesn't it seem that if the election were truly to be close, that they would have to worry that either candidate might win? Shouldn't they have wanted to do more to open it up? And just what would they have sacrificed to do so?

It's a nerves-of-steel strategy, if indeed that was the strategy. If it works, it's very powerful -- Bush can claim a mandate and there is no one but a few bloggers and political scientists to call him on it. He is free to act without having paid the extra, small price that it would have taken to win a broader affirmation from the American people.