| The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, November 08, 2008, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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The limited meanings of electoral victory. It was a massive victory. The president-elect garnered more votes than any other in American history. He also took an absolute majority of all votes cast, a feat his party's presidential candidate hadn't managed in many, many years. And to top it off, the president-elect's party won firm control of both branches of Congress. This must be the beginning of a whole new era, conservatives boasted. Yes, conservatives. This was 2004. It's easy to forget now -- and some would prefer we forget -- but conservatives hailed George W. Bush's re-election as a smashing victory that proved the United States was shifting rightward and would continue to do so for a generation. This triumphalism was sad. Seldom have we seen a more extreme example of collective delusion. Sitting presidents are typically returned to office with comfortable victories -- barring economic recession or similar misfortune -- but George W. Bush was re-elected with the narrowest margin since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. Bush won more votes than any other president in history simply because there were more voters than ever before, and he won a majority of votes for the first time since 1988 because there was no significant third-party candidate for the first time since 1988. When he took the oath of office for the second time, his approval rating was lower than any re-elected president since polling began and his disapproval rating was far higher. Even Republican control of Congress was less meaningful than it seemed: It had been won almost exclusively on the issue of terrorism and polling showed that the rest of the Republican agenda -- from privatizing social security to tort reform to tax cuts -- was actually quite unpopular. The policies that did score highly in the surveys were things like "providing health insurance to the uninsured" and "dealing with the problems of poor and needy people." Even "increasing the minimum wage" did better than most of the Bush administration's priorities.
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It should have been obvious that the American people were not more conservative than in the 1990s and it was sheer fantasy to think the Republicans would dominate for a generation. And no, I am not being clever with the benefit of hindsight. "The November election was a near-death experience for Mr. Bush," I wrote in January, 2005. "Contrary to appearances, the tectonic plates of American politics and culture are staying put." As James Q. Wilson, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the 2004 election, "the nation did not undergo a rightward shift in 2004 any more than it had when it elected Reagan in 1980 and re-elected him in 1984. The policy preferences of Americans are remarkably stable, a fact that has been confirmed by virtually every scholar who has looked at the matter. " People tend to assume that electoral outcomes reflect popular opinion. Isn't that the point of democracy? Unfortunately, that assumption is wrong, and for a very simple reason. Voters cannot choose the candidates and policies they most want. They can only choose from the options on the ballot. And it is party politics that determines what those options will be and popular opinion is only one of many factors that drives party politics. This is Political Science 101 but pretty much everyone --from Joe Sixpack to journalists and politicians -- is either unaware of this basic fact or they forget it in the emotional swirl of electoral victory. In 2004, it was conservatives' turn to be delusional. Now, it's liberals. Barack Obama's victory was indisputably significant in an historical sense. It was also a very solid triumph. But as John Robson wrote on these pages yesterday, it was no "landslide."
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Yes, Obama was the first Democrat to win an absolute majority of votes since Jimmy Carter in 1976 but that's only because he was the first winning Democrat who didn't have a significant third-party candidate splitting the vote. And yes, he won the most votes of any president ever -- because, again, there were more voters than ever. The only thing proved by these factoids is that liberals can be as uncritical and silly as conservatives. As for a new liberal era, well, I'd love to see some survey data showing a big move in American opinion about public policy but I don't think they exist. What is real is that in California, a very blue state, a proposal to amend the state constitution to strip homosexuals of the right to marry was narrowly approved by the same electorate that voted heavily for Barack Obama. In fact, it was the unusually high turnout among African-Americans -- 70 per cent of whom voted for the proposal -- that ensured gay people will be stripped of this most basic civil right. It was ugly and shameful and not liberal in the least. Fortunately, everything I've heard from and about Barack Obama indicates he's too self-aware, too thoughtful, to make the mistake victorious partisans routinely do. Just look at his victory speech. In sharp contrast to George W. Bush's strutting in 2004, there was nothing resembling triumphalism. He was serious, even somber. He spoke of listening to those "whose votes I did not earn." He called for a "new spirit of sacrifice." He scarcely smiled. This is clearly a man who understands the enormous challenges he faces and, it seems, a man who understands the limited nature of his victory. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |