Mandate Time

The partisan dispute du jour seems to concern the question of a mandate. In one sense, clearly, Bush has secured his mandate -- elected under questionable circumstances he won a majority. In another sense, there's not much of a mandate here -- he campaigned mainly by attacking John Kerry and promising not to allow gays to get married, there was no popular ratification of, say, Health Savings Accounts. In the sense that matters, Bush has all the mandate in the world. He has his congressional majorities. They have expanded. Nobody was punished at the polls for being too deferential to Bush. Something as minor as a loss by, say, Chris Shays might have frightened other Blue Republicans. Instead, the moral of the story for moderates is going to be that Arlen Specter came closer to losing his primary than the general election. And ever Red Republican will be loyal-as-can-be since, evidently, loyalty brings benefits.

There will be no congressional oversight. Some liberals have drawn an analogy to the 1972 election, but during the second Nixon administration Democrats controlled the congress and the political benefits of being a Nixon loyalist (as opposed to merely not-George-McGovern) were unclear. Talk of the Senate Democrats blocking this or that is, likewise, futile. The Republicans only need to get a handful of Democrats to block a filibuster. Will Sens. Dorgan, Nelson, Other Nelson, Landrieux, Lincoln, Conrad, and Johnson be more or less confident in their ability to survive as opponents of Bushism? Beyond those seven, are the swing Senators like Bingaman, Reid, Harkin, Dayton, Kohl, Levin, and Stabenow (Feingold, clearly, would rather lose than compromise, so I leave him off the list). This crowd probably won't defect lightly, but will be open to pressure to sign on to large, bad bills that have small, good-for-the-local-economy elements in order to minimize their exposure on purely ideological lines.