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November 22, 2004
Does Bush Have a Mandate for His Conservative Agenda?
Perhaps the silliest of the claims put forward about Bush's narrow victory on November 2 was that he had some sort of mandate to pursue his conservative policy ends. Nothing could be farther from the truth as demonstrated convincingly in this memo "What Mandate: A Report on the Joint National Post-Election Survey" by Stan Greenberg and Bob Borosage. As they point out in the memo:
A majority of voters backed the president, but they still thought the country was off track and preferred a different direction in America’s relations with the world and on domestic social policy...[T]he public’s priorities are wholly different than those the president put forth in the days after the election. That is particularly clear if one looks at fiscal and tax policies, health care, and Social Security privatization.
They conclude:
Progressives should feel confident in mobilizing opposition to these initiatives. If the president goes forward and the lines are drawn, voters will finally hear the differences
on economic issues and strategy that they were looking for at the beginning of this paign. If the argument is drawn clearly, the president and his allies will find themselves facing significant voter skepticism, and generating potential electoral vulnerability. The president’s claim to an electoral mandate for his agenda misreads where the voters are.
Just so. But there are a lot of interesting findings in the memo, so check out the whole thing. My personal favorite: the finding that, while voters' first choice of a Bush campaign initiative for him to pursue in his second term is continuing the war on terrorism, their second choice is.....nothing.
That about says it all.
Posted by Ruy Teixeira at 07:35 PM | link
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