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Chapter 3: Obama’s Problem: Misreading the Mandate

Professor Skocpol has done her usual superb job in evaluating the successes and failures of the Obama administration to this point and in looking critically at the current state of American politics. It is my goal merely to suggest some additional thoughts that may help expand the conversation.

To consider why things might have gone wrong during the first years of the Obama presidency— Professor Skocpol’s assumption is that things did go wrong— it might help to take a brief look at what happened to another presidency that began nearly thirty years earlier and found itself after two years in much the same place President Obama is today.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan carried forty- four states and won the electoral college 489 to 49. One possible explanation for such an impressive outcome— the explanation favored by Mr. Reagan’s supporters, myself among them— was that the American people had rebelled against a government that they believed had become too big, too expensive, too intrusive. In this scenario, Reagan’s election was a mandate to move the country in a more conservative direction, with fewer government programs, lower taxes, less regulation, and in the areas of foreign and defense policy a much more muscular confrontation with the Soviet Union.

The other possibility was that voters had simply tired of Jimmy Carter; that they considered him unsuited for the office he occupied; that they were tired of his woeful countenance, that they were tired of what they perceived to be a pervasive ineptitude whether dealing with Iran or infl ation. They wanted him gone and Ronald Reagan was the only serious alternative. Besides, with a third candidate, John Anderson, a much more liberal Republican, on the ballot, Reagan, the only conservative among the three, received less than 51 percent of the popular vote. And against an opponent who first had to fend off a serious challenge in his own party. Hardly an overwhelming landslide.

There was some validity to both interpretations— by the end of November 1984, there had been 100 separate state elections for president in which Ronald Reagan was a candidate— two in each of the fifty states— and Reagan had won 93 of those 100 elections. But while he enjoyed an occasional working majority in Congress during his first two years, voters punished his party in the midterm elections after he had been in office for just two years. And while he later regained much of his lost popularity and was reelected overwhelmingly, he was never again given a Congress whose support he could count on.