Mandate

I very nearly blogged on this same article by Janet Hook (aka Linder?) in the Los Angeles Times that Josh Marshall brings up, but I abandoned the post when I went back over the Bush campaign agenda during the 2004 election, and found some mention of Social Security and tax reform.

Nevertheless, Marshall is right, Bush did not focus his campaign on radical reforms: Bush mentioned reforms principally to confirmed supporters. Now, after the election, for Bush to claim a mandate on these points, when the genuine focus was instead the War on Terror, is clearly just bait-and-switch.

After the election, Bush clearly felt he had graduated to Master of the Universe status, and was freed of the need to seek any consensus with Democrats. Overreaching and hubris were in fashion. As Marshall says:

The idea that President Bush ran on a specific agenda that included privatizing Social Security strikes me as little more than preposterous. And I am surprised to see Linder accept it so uncritically.

Yes, he did mention it during the campaign -- just enough to allow his supporters to say now that he didn't spring it on the public without ever having mentioned it before. But when he did mention it, it was almost always in speeches to loyalists and just as a few toss-off lines intended for said loyalists' eager consumption.

But he didn't bring it up in ads, in the debates, in any prominent setting. And for good reason. His entire campaign was framed around two planks: strength against terrorism and the flaws of John Kerry. The first time it got any sort of significant emphasis from the president was a couple days after the election.

Indeed, I think we could make the whole point more specific. Since his election President Bush has laid out a very aggressive legislative agenda, one based on reforms that would fundamentally change how the country looks -- privatization, tax reform, etc. These just weren't the things he ran on. It may not have been 'Morning in America', more like 'Midnight in America'. He ran on toughness against terror. Then once he'd bagged reelection he shifted gears entirely to focus on political economy.

If he really had run hard on privatization and won, even narrowly, he'd be in a vastly stronger position on the issue now than he is. What this last six months has shown is the poverty of the idea that winning an election gives you a 'mandate' if you try to use it to push policies you'd never told voters you were going to push.