Immediately after the results of the election came in, the newly re-elected President Bush announced that he had won "political capital" and that he intended to spend it. In other words, he believed that he had won a mandate from the American people.
I guess that this attitude is not surprising, considering that he treated his first term in office as a mandate as well, despite losing to Gore by 500,000 votes and being placed into office by many of his father's Supreme Court appointees.
What was startling was that the issues that were largely ignored by the president throughout his campaign have become the focus of his second term agenda. Conventional wisdom states that the president won largely because of terrorism and the turnout of conservative Christians. Yet in spite of this, barely a word is now spoken about new terror-fighting policies, abortion restrictions, returning God to the public square or the gay marriage amendment.
Instead of these international and social issues, the president has set his sights on the privatization of social security, curbing medical malpractice lawsuits and searching for oil in the only sliver of Alaska not already open to drilling.
I get it now! It's a classic bait-and-switch. A vote to stop abortion is really a vote to help Wall Street through the privatization of social security. A vote to stop gay marriage is really a vote for the insurance companies who don't want to pay when a doctor says "uh-oh!" A vote for the words "under God" in the pledge is really a vote to whore out the last slice of the Alaskan pizza to Big Oil.
But I digress.
Bush went into Wednesday's State of the Union address with some of the most dismal job approval numbers ever seen by a re-elected president. The most recent polls taken before the speech by ABC News, Fox News, Zogby, CBS, NBC and the Los Angeles Times all had one thing in common: they all had the President at or below 50 percent approval. What "capital" does he have to spend when he cannot even get the support of a majority of the American people?
The President's numbers on individual issues aren't any better either.
According to an ABC News poll, only 38 percent of Americans approve of the way Bush is handling Social Security. That number is countered by a 55 percent disapproval rating.
On Iraq, only 40 percent of Americans approve of the president's policy, while 55 percent disapprove, according to a CBS News poll. Interestingly enough, he has the approval of over 75 percent of Republicans, yet only 33 percent of Independents and 13 percent of Democrats agree with him. I say, let the blind lead the blind.
My point is that Bush may have won the election, but he received no mandate for broad change. In fact, he won re-election by the narrowest margin since 1916. Just think: 55 million people chose "the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate" over Bush. Kerry got more votes than Reagan, Clinton, Gore or anyone else in history aside from our current president.
Real mandates include Reagan winning 49 states and LBJ receiving 64 percent of the vote, not winning the state of Ohio by little more than 100,000 votes.
Write to Steve at NawaraInTheDN@hotmail.com
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