The Mandate

Let me repeat my obligatory Democratic absolution formula: I can't believe that Nixon's former counsel John Dean is one of my favorite political writers.  It just doesn't seem right.  Bad cosmic balance, or disturbed karma, or something.

Now that I've got that out of the way, Dean's latest is about the Bush Mandate, or what Bush claims to be The Mandate, anyway:  Does Bush Now Have Political Capital to Spend? A Look at the Historical Record Suggests the Answer Is No Findlaw 11/19/04.

The concept of the "electoral mandate" is a somewhat vague one, but meaningful nevertheless.  Dean gives a good historical sketch of the election results of incumbent presidents seeking a second term.  And he reminds us that Eisenhower after the 1952 election claimed a mandate to resolve the Korean War.  And after the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson claimed a mandate to proceed with landmark civil rights legislation.

In both cases, the candidates had won with a substantial margin and those issues were central issues in the campaigns.  Bush's "mandate" looks quite different:

Now compare Bush's claim for a mandate: He received 51% of the popular vote, and only 34 more electoral college vote than his challenger. This tiny edge is no mandate, and underwhelming political capital for an incumbent.

To make matters worse, the very issues Bush claims to have a mandate to address -- selecting conservative judges, partially privatizing Social Security, and revising the tax code -- were barely mentioned during the presidential campaign.

And Dean identifies five major areas of liabilities for Bush's second term (direct quotes from Dean in italics):

1. First, there is the continuing cost of anti-terrorism measures. In Osama bin Laden's November 1 taped message he explained that Al Qaeda's policy is to "bleed[] America to the point of bankruptcy." That tactic, he noted, was drawn from the 1980s Afghan Mujahedeen, with whom he fought - and who "bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."

No one front in the so-called global war on terrorism (GWOT) is going to bankrupt the US.  But the administration is using the GWOT as a blanket justification for a whole range of military expenses that are questionably related to America's real security needs, if not outright boondoggles (Star Wars "missile defense").

2. Second, there is the Iraq war: It's killing Americans and further draining our resources, while at the same time, proving to be a recruiting dream for terrorism organizers. The New Republic had it right when it wrote that "[h]onest conservatives, even those who admire President Bush, know he didn't earn a second term. They know he staked his presidency on a catastrophe, and that, by all rights, Iraq should be his political epitaph." Put another way, Bush has yet to pay the piper for his Iraqi war, but sooner or later that debt must be paid.

3. The budget deficit. Dean pictures a big problem arising as conservative Republicans insist on more cuts to balance the budget.  But during the first term, those supposed fiscal conservatives managed to swallow their budgetary scruples and proceed to spend and borrow at a rate far exceeding even the Reagan-era credit-card binge.

But even though deficit-hawks may be overly pessimistic about the damage that deficits do as a rule, these are truly phenomenal deficits, so they are likely to affect the economy negatively in various ways.  In combination with the trade deficit, the dollar could be in for a real hammering.

4. The "foreign policy schism" between traditional conservatives and the "neoconservatives" driving Bush's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.  I think Dean is overrating the potential for this split.  Yes, the Pat Buchanan, neo-Confederate factions of the Republican Party has their doubts about Bush's foreign policy.  But those concerns seem to be overwhelmed for all practical purposes by admiration of Bush's tough-guy posturing, unilateralism and belligerent rhetoric.  I just don't see this a becoming a particular problem for Bush in the second term.

What we are likely to see is Republicans coming up with various ways to disassociate themselves from the outcomes of Bush's Iraq policies.  But I doubt that the criticisms will sound much like libertarian anti-imperalism.  It will be more like, "We didn't cause enough destruction in the early stages of the war."

Besides, the administration is already gearing up for a military standoff with Iran.  The more that the Republicans get pulled into endorsing Bush's expanding list of targets for preventive war, the more difficult it will be for any of them to stake out distinctively different foreign policy positions.  If Dean is expecting something comparable to the conservative Republican revolt against Jerry Ford's foreign policy over issues like the Panama Canal Treaty, I don't think that's likely.

5. Fifth, and finally, while Bush may have won the election battle, his war with Senator Kerry is anything but over. As The Washington Post reported, Kerry "plans to use his Senate seat and long lists of supporters to remain a major voice in American politics despite losing the presidential race last Tuesday, and he is assessing the feasibility of trying again in 2008."

I'm not sure how it is that this tradition got started in the Democratic Party of unsuccessful nominees fading out of a central role in the party leadership.  McGovern in 1972 was more of an insurgent candidate within the party with not a lot of enthusiasm among party regulars, so I can understand his fading in influence.  But Mondale in 1984, Dukakis in 1988, Gore in 2000 - why shouldn't they have still played prominent roles as the titular leader of the party and a major spokesperson on key issues?  I would be happy to see Kerry break that trend.

Of Dean's five liability factors, I think the Iraq War and subsequent unilateralist foreign policy actions are likely to be the most significant.  And additional terrorist strikes against American civilian targets by Al Qaeda or other jihadists, or by our homegrown terrorist groups that have nothing to do with the jihadists, could also develop into major political problems for this administration.  If there is another big one, it would be hard for the administration to avoid suspicions that their approach to the GWOT is deficient.  A Bush-loyalty purge at the CIA and the State Department are not the best ways to prosecute the GWOT.

And speaking of prosecutions, it may be a bad sign that Dean didn't mentioned legal scandals as a major weakness for the next four years.  With cases like the Valerie Plame business (exposing an undercover CIA agent), the Iranian espionage case and the torture scandal hanging out there, there should be problems for this administration over those.  But probably with Alberto Gonzales the Torture Guy as the Attorney General, there's a lesser chance of those cases being pursued as they should be.

And just this week, we've seen the House Republicans change their rules so that Tom DeLay can continue to serve in a leadership position even if he's indicted on criminal charges in Texas.  This Repulican Values Congress is unlikely to aggressively pursue any of those cases on their own with any notable vigor.  And the notion of them holding Bush to account for violating the Congressional war resolution on Iraq is laughable.

Dean observes in this article that "the GOP has, in less than a decade, remade the House of Representatives into a body that resembles the Russian Duma."  The Duma was the toothless, mostly phony parliamentary body that acted as a rubber-stamp and thin coat of legitimacy for the Russian Tsar.