Bush won a mandate because he SOUGHT one
John Podhoretz has the perfect answer to stridently distraught libs who are insisting up and down that Bush has no second term mandate:
"The President only won the popular vote by three percentage points nationwide, they say. It was the narrowest re-election victory since Woodrow Wilson's in 1916, they say. A shift of 70,000 votes in Ohio would have changed the entire election, they say. Bush did not win a victory anywhere near as commanding as Ronald Reagan's in 1984, they say.
"[T]hey have done grave injury to their own argument by citing Reagan's towering 1984 victory as the most recent case in which a president received a 'mandate' from the American people. Yes, in 1984, Reagan did win a huge re-election victory — by some measures the largest in American political history. But it was a victory without a mandate, and everyone at the time knew it. Reagan's vote total that year was huge precisely because he didn't go before the American people asking them for anything remotely resembling a 'mandate.' Instead, Reagan ran a feel-good 'morning in America' campaign that dismayed many of his supporters because it was so devoid of content. The election was a personal triumph, but it did not translate into a second-term governing agenda — and he had significant difficulty pushing through some of his more controversial policies as a result.
"What George W. Bush did in the election of 2004 was far different. Bush went to the American people and said, in effect, 'Here I am. I grasped that 9/11 was a turning point in American history and will continue to pursue a confrontational path with radical terrorists in my next term. I took this nation to war in Iraq and I will fight it in my next term until it is won. I pursued economic policies that are bearing fruit and will blossom in time if we can institutionalize them in my next term. I said I would work to fix the Social Security system, but there was too much else to do; I will focus on that in my next term.'
"This President placed his most controversial and polarizing decisions at the center of his quest for a second term. He made no bones about what he planned to do, and 60 million Americans decided that sounded acceptable to them."
Think of it this way: if GDub hadn't won a second term mandate, would defeated libs be so desperate to point it out?
"The President only won the popular vote by three percentage points nationwide, they say. It was the narrowest re-election victory since Woodrow Wilson's in 1916, they say. A shift of 70,000 votes in Ohio would have changed the entire election, they say. Bush did not win a victory anywhere near as commanding as Ronald Reagan's in 1984, they say.
"[T]hey have done grave injury to their own argument by citing Reagan's towering 1984 victory as the most recent case in which a president received a 'mandate' from the American people. Yes, in 1984, Reagan did win a huge re-election victory — by some measures the largest in American political history. But it was a victory without a mandate, and everyone at the time knew it. Reagan's vote total that year was huge precisely because he didn't go before the American people asking them for anything remotely resembling a 'mandate.' Instead, Reagan ran a feel-good 'morning in America' campaign that dismayed many of his supporters because it was so devoid of content. The election was a personal triumph, but it did not translate into a second-term governing agenda — and he had significant difficulty pushing through some of his more controversial policies as a result.
"What George W. Bush did in the election of 2004 was far different. Bush went to the American people and said, in effect, 'Here I am. I grasped that 9/11 was a turning point in American history and will continue to pursue a confrontational path with radical terrorists in my next term. I took this nation to war in Iraq and I will fight it in my next term until it is won. I pursued economic policies that are bearing fruit and will blossom in time if we can institutionalize them in my next term. I said I would work to fix the Social Security system, but there was too much else to do; I will focus on that in my next term.'
"This President placed his most controversial and polarizing decisions at the center of his quest for a second term. He made no bones about what he planned to do, and 60 million Americans decided that sounded acceptable to them."
Think of it this way: if GDub hadn't won a second term mandate, would defeated libs be so desperate to point it out?
posted by JASmius at 2:42 PM
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