What Did Bush Win?

We seem, as a country, to have accepted the fact that Bush won the election, even if Kerry did come within 70,000 votes of snatching Ohio and the presidency.

(Yes, some liberals are talking about the blue states seceding and a Human Events writer says the red states should expel the blues from the US of A, but I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that won't happen.)

There is plenty of debate, though, about a mandate. Did Bush win one? If so, what does it cover? Anything that he and his conservative allies feel like doing for the next four years, or only detailed positions he pushed during the campaign? Just how much of that "political capital" is in the presidential bank account?

Let's be clear: Every winning candidate tries to stretch his success at the polls into a mandate. And every president does things he didn't talk about, or skated over, during the campaign. When Bill Clinton won, he didn't have a mandate to change the gays-in-the-military policy, but did anyway. He had campaigned on health care reform, but not the incredibly complicated Hillarycare scheme he wound up proposing. And he campaigned on a middle-class tax cut but didn't deliver one. (Nothing unusual here -- LBJ said he would never send American boys to die in an Asian war and then massively expanded our intervention in Vietnam.)

So Democrats are perfectly entitled to oppose any Bush proposal that he didn't spend much time explaining. The president often mentioned Social Security private accounts, but never explained how they would work or how much they would cost. I don't remember him saying he would launch a full-scale invasion of Fallujah as soon as the election was over. But on other issues -- tax cuts, fighting terror, tort reform, conservative judges -- Bush's position was quite clear.

Is it really fair for liberals to argue he doesn't have a mandate? Or is that just sour grapes by the losing side?

Salon's Eric Boehlert takes the debate a step further by arguing that the media shouldn't be buying into this mandate talk. I'd argue that the press usually gives reelected presidents at least a brief honeymoon, and that "mandate" in many of these stories is shorthand for winning the popular vote by 3.5 million, as opposed to taking office as a popular-vote loser.

What is "unexpected," says Boehlert, is "the notion that President Bush, the most conservative and polarizing president of his generation, would come through the other side of the campaign as a moderate with a mandate. Yet in the days immediately following the historically close vote, that's how the political press corps often portrayed the president.

"Newsweek seemed to be the most optimistic about the chances of a kinder, gentler second term, suggesting, 'Bush could bring us together.' . . .

"Helping the administration's cause, the New York Times on Monday left unquestioned the assertion by a Bush aide that the president's chief domestic goal is to 'solve the problems of poverty, the inner city and education,' as well as persuade the country that 'there really is such a thing as a compassionate conservative.' Internationally, 'Bush is determined to prove that it is not naive or impossible to try to foster democracy in the Middle East,' the Times added. . . .

"USA Today headlined a Nov. 4 story 'Clear Mandate Will Boost Bush's Authority, Reach,' which said that Bush 'will begin his second term with a clearer and more commanding mandate than he held for the first.' (The first being when he lost the popular vote to Al Gore.) The Boston Globe asserted that Bush's victory grants him 'a clear mandate to advance a conservative agenda over the next four years,' while MSNBC's Chris Matthews insisted, 'To me the big story is the president's mandate. The president has a mandate.' . . .

"The press's timidity toward the Bush White House is nothing new, and for the trend to continue after his victory is not that surprising."

From the other side, the Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti says liberals "have settled on an answer" to the election: "America is on the brink of civil war.

" 'Not since the Civil War,' Columbia University professor and noted art critic Simon Schama wrote in the Manchester Guardian on Sunday, 'has the fault line between [America's] two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable.'

"Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz agrees. He told Dean Murphy in Sunday's New York Times that there are only 'two instances in history' when the American electorate has been so divided. 'They are kind of scary examples,' Wilentz said. 'One is 1860, and we know what happened after that one. . . .'

"It's not just noted liberal academics who believe we're about to reenact the Civil War. It's newspaper writers and television pundits. It's Hollywood actors, like Mandy Patinkin: 'We were driving around early this morning and saying to each other in the car, I always wondered what it was like, the mentality during the Civil War in America,' Patankin told CTV this week. 'Now I know. It's just completely divided.' . . .

"Of course, if you live in a two-party democracy, then you live in a divided society. That's the way it works. One party wins, the other loses. And just because one party is out of power doesn't inevitably mean that the states who voted for the losing candidate need to start thinking about secession."

What a relief!

As for the AG's job, so much for the New York Post's Giuliani speculation. Alberto Gonzalez is the man:

"By contrast with John Ashcroft, whose resignation Bush accepted Tuesday, Gonzales is considered a social moderate, whose credentials have been questioned by the religious right. But he is also expected to continue the department's aggressive war on terror," says the Los Angeles Times.

"The nomination is likely to resonate with the growing plurality of Latino voters who endorsed Bush in the presidential election last week. And it brought relief from religious conservatives who have been alarmed by months of speculation that Bush intended to elevate Gonzales to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"But he is also expected to face opposition from human-rights groups at his confirmation hearings for his role in setting administration policy on the rights of suspected terrorists, and the creation of military tribunals in Cuba."

"For Mr. Gonzales," says the New York Times, "it was a remarkable moment in a journey that has taken him from a house with no hot water or phone to Rice and Harvard Law School, the White House and now one of the most visible and influential jobs in Washington. . . .

"As attorney general, he will be forced to prove and defend himself on many of the most important and ideologically charged issues facing the nation.

"He is viewed with some suspicion by Democrats, who promised on Wednesday to question him aggressively about his role in setting administration policy on detaining and questioning people captured in the effort to combat terrorism. And he is seen as unreliable by many conservatives, who said he has not been sufficiently hard line on the issues of most concern to them, including abortion and affirmative action."

USA Today's take: "Gonzales' replacing Ashcroft could signal something else: a dramatic change in style from a brash, hard-line conservative whose taste for publicity occasionally annoyed the White House, to a soft-spoken team player whose political views are much less clear."

Total control will not be a panacea for the GOP, says former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich in American Prospect:

"George W. Bush's biggest problem over the next four years will be a Congress that's even more Republican than it was in 2000. Let me explain.

"In their heart of hearts, presidents don't like it when their own party controls both houses of Congress. It's the same whether the new President is a Republican or a Democrat. Why? Because when your own party runs Congress, you've got to help them pay off all the IOUs they've accumulated along the campaign trail from all their constituents and patrons and sponsors. You don't have the excuse that you can't help with the payoffs because the other party runs one or both houses of Congress. No, it's entirely your party. You're stuck with the bill for it.

"Look at what happened to Bush over the last four years, with a Republican Congress. Non-defense spending grew by an average of 8 percent a year. Under Bill Clinton, it grew by an average of only 4.3 percent a year. Meanwhile, special-interest tax loopholes exploded over the past four years. The corporate tax bill the president signed last month was the biggest piece of special-interest pork in history. Yet tax loopholes increased only moderately under Clinton.

"Why could Clinton hold down spending and special-interest tax loopholes when Bush couldn't? Because for most of the Clinton years, Republicans and Democrats in Congress couldn't agree on much of anything. That meant Clinton could veto or threaten to veto even bills containing pet projects of leading Democrats by blaming Republicans for larding up the bills with too many favors.

"Over the last four years, Bush has signed every spending bill that came his way -- every morsel of pork for the folks back home in every Republican congressional district, every bit of corporate welfare for the big businesses that contributed to every Republican senator and every Republican representative. . . . Poor President Bush. Now he has an even larger Republican majority."

As if to underscore Reich's point, the Washington Times finds one part of the Bush agenda running into trouble:

"House leaders on immigration policy said yesterday that there isn't enough support in Congress to pass a guest-worker program for illegal aliens, despite President Bush's renewed push for such a proposal. . . .

"White House political adviser Karl Rove said Mr. Bush will renew his push for the guest-worker proposal in the new Congress. That effort is bound to infuriate conservatives, who believe that they were key to Mr. Bush's re-election last week and say this is a strange use of a presidential mandate."

Arlen Specter, still fighting for his Judiciary chairmanship, says he's part of a dwindling breed:

"After a week of attacks from the right, the senator said in an interview that the campaign against him was predictable," reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

" 'I think that being the only pro-choice Republican on the Judiciary Committee makes me suspect,' he said. 'And it makes me suspect without cause on this issue of whether I would block pro-life nominees on a litmus test. It's been difficult for pro-choice Republicans in the Senate because there are so few of us,' Specter continued. Though more than half of registered Republicans say they support abortion rights, with some limitations, 'that branch of the party has never been vocal,' he added."

After a reporter prematurely told Bush at last week's news conference that Yasser Arafat had died, the Palestinian leader has now passed. And the New York Post doesn't hide its editorial feelings, with a banner headline: "ARAFAT DEAD/ And He Won't Be Missed."

Ryan Lizza has a juicy New Republic post on the blame game for the Kerryites. He uses initials, but I'll helpfully translate:

"I thought I would give folks a quick preview of how various people from the Kerry world are faring so far in the recriminations war. . . .

"Bob Shrum: Thought he was running 12 Senate races, not one presidential campaign. Senior Kerry aide: 'There should be a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule, and there should definitely be a seven-strikes-and-you're-out rule.'

"Stephanie Cutter: . . . Staffers are now mounting a defense. 'It wasn't her fault we had no message.'

"John Sasso: If only he had hopped on the plane sooner. 'He came up and imposed order and cleaned [stuff] up. . . . He wasn't like, 'Hello, you have done such a great job.' It was, 'What the [expletive] is this? I'm here to cleanup not to make friends.''

"Joe Lockhart: Pro: The adult they desperately needed at 15th and I. Con: The obsession with Al Qaqaa may have cost Kerry the race in the final week.

"Terry McAuliffe: Somehow survives no matter how bad the party fares. But some say he's being unfairly blamed for Kerry debacle. After all, his main job was fundraising and the ground game, which were both successful. 'It wasn't his fault we had no message.'

"John Edwards: Pro: He should have been the nominee. Con: '[He] would have gotten killed. He doesn't even really do the whole bible thing. And go ask [him] what he's hunted.'

"John Kerry: Said to have told troops at Saturday night party in Washington: 'The press don't know what they are talking about. We outpolled Bush in the battleground states by a point and a half! We hadn't tried in the blue states.' Kerry aide: 'Pathetic.' "

National Review's Jonah Goldberg doesn't like his label:

"I don't take any giant amount of pride in being a Republican. I'm a conservative.

"This is a distinction lost on the mainstream media. Most cable-news networks consider conservatives, Republicans, and -- even more egregiously -- libertarians utterly interchangeable. I get booked to debate liberals on TV all the time. In about half the circumstances, my opponent is a Democratic-party operative, or 'consultant.' The same happens to liberal journalists who are booked with various GOP activists. The problem with this arrangement is that, by their very nature, party apparatchiks care about their party more than ideas. . . .

"Let me put it this way: I want the Democratic party to move to the center on cultural and economic issues. Yes, it would mean that the Democrats would win more elections. That's pretty much beyond dispute. Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president to be reelected since Roosevelt, and it was because he moved his party to the political center.

"If the Democrats won more elections by moving to the middle, it would be bad news for the Republican party, to be sure. But it would be good news for America -- if you believe, as I do, that America would be better off moving in a more conservative direction. Keep in mind that when the Democrats move to the left, the Republicans move leftward to the middle -- that is, to the left. So Republicans who cheer the leftward tilt of the Democrats shouldn't be surprised when the entire political center of gravity moves to the left as well."

And how could we possibly resist this Page Six item from the NY Post?

"Sen. Zell Miller (D- Ga.) laced into New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd Tuesday on the 'Imus in the Morning' radio show, saying, 'The more Maureen Loud [sic] gets on 'Meet the Press' and writes those columns, the redder these states get. I mean, they don't want some high brow hussy from New York City explaining to them that they're idiots and telling them that they're stupid.' Miller also suggested 'that red-headed woman at the New York Times' should not mock anyone's religion: 'You can see horns just sprouting up through that Technicolor hair.'

"Dowd responds: 'I'm not a highbrow hussy from New York. I'm a highbrow hussy from Washington. Senator, pistols or swords?' "