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

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11/12/2004

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.

Posted by Mark Schmitt on 11/12/2004 at 03:09 PM in 2004 elections, Decembrist archives | Permalink

Comments

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It is also an intent to polarize and increase the tensions. If Bush had played to win fifty states, more Democrats would have moved right and the Democratic image would have included more moderate or conservative Democrats from border areas. Now Democrats are identified with few heavily urban states.

Also a strategy in the House of keeping the agenda radical and the votes close vastly increases the pressure and party discipline on moderate Republicans.

Posted by: bob mcmanus | 11/12/2004 at 08:03 PM

This makes a great deal of sense. I would also read the Gonzalez nomination as a move to finally inoculate the GOP from Abu Ghraib. It is as though they perceive their own failure as a virus: It is not something that they did wrong; rather, it's something they survived, and which therefore makes them stronger; to republicize it is another level of inoculation, and will leave them stronger still.

I don't know how else to explain why, with his first major post-election appointment, Bush would intentionally restart the whole discussion about his attacks on international law in general and the Geneva convention in particular.

If the Gonzalez nomination does turn into a senate hearing on the Geneva convention, isn't it rather the perfect storm for John McCain, given his biography?

Peace, Jarrett

Posted by: Jarrett | 11/12/2004 at 08:28 PM

Great posting and fascinating theory except for the fact that Bush won 60 million votes, a majority of the count, and improved his standing in almost every state. That's a rather convincing mandate to do pretty much anything he wants.

Don't worry. You'll survive. Just like last time.

Posted by: murphy | 11/12/2004 at 10:38 PM

Wow. Fascinating proposition, and frankly kind of creepy. Also brilliant, as you say, if the narrow margin of victory was engineered.

I might quibble with the proposition that there's "no external factor" in Bush's decline. But that's neither here nor there, really.

A narrow margin of victory has tangible benefits, I think, for Bush and the GOP. Beyond the freedom of action it affords him, it also serves to keep the GOP voter base far more engaged and attentive than a blowout would have. Blowouts presumably encourage complacency in the base, and a comfortable margin of victory presumably erodes party discipline. It seems less crucial to vote when your party won by eight or ten or twelve percent last time. So.

Bush has been accused of encouraging a climate of fear in the United States to consolidate his rule, and some critics have interpreted his foreign policy as a "war-without-end" model. Considering the 2004 election in the light you suggest, it could be easily argued, I think, that he is ruling his party in the same way--as long as the Democrats are within a hair's breadth of taking the presidency away, fear of that will get the voters out to the polls, and the bitter partisan warfare that narrow margins seem to inspire will likely keep the disparate factions of the GOP more unified than they might otherwise be against the "liberal menace" that is now and forever breathing down their necks (though never quite catching up).

Great post. Thanks.

Posted by: Dano | 11/13/2004 at 09:05 AM

Check R. Zeckhauser and D. King at Harvard University's JFK School who have written - Why Legislator's Lose by a lot but Win by A Little. I think your conjectures pretty much hit the nail on the head. And it is an active field of research in Poli Sci

Posted by: drkwanda | 11/14/2004 at 03:42 PM

There is indeed a political science article or two on this topic. I don't have a cite in front of me but there is something by David King of Harvard and he found that in Congressional votes on high priority presidential initiatives the President tends to either win by a small margin or lose by a big one.

Posted by: Stuart | 11/16/2004 at 04:39 PM

the article is called Congressional Vote Options in the August 2003 issue of Legislative Studies Quarterly.

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