Bush Has No Mandate, Just A Better Machine

by Mark Hertsgaard
Politiken, Nov 5, 2004

The morning after the US presidential election, vice president Dick Cheney was claiming—and US media pundits agreed—that the results were a mandate for President Bush's right-wing agenda. Meanwhile, Bush critics were raging about living in a country, as one impassioned email put it, of morons, yahoos and rednecks who don't believe in evolution and want to return to the Middle Ages. For their part, foreigners were asking whether America had lost its mind. That Bush was named (one can't say elected) president in 2000 had been hard enough to fathom, but people here, even nationalist right-wingers, can't believe America did it twice, one Dutch resident said.

But whether elated or despairing, such sweeping conclusions about the November 2 results misread the national American mood. Blame the winner-take-all rules that govern US elections. They credit Bush with much more popular support than he truly enjoys while obscuring the real reasons for his victory, including the superior political machine at his disposal.

The fact is, the American public is evenly divided about Bush. Only 51 percent of the electorate voted to give him a second term as president, while 49 percent voted against. In parliamentary democracies, such a close election would result in a coalition government, with power sharing between rival parties. America's winner take all system instead grants total power to the 51 percent candidate and nothing to his 49 percent counterpart.

It's a very American way of looking at the world, winner-take-all. It's no accident that no major American sport allows contests to end in ties. You're either a winner or a loser here.

Winner-take-all can be especially misleading when combined with the vagaries of the Electoral College, for a candidate gets all of a given state's electoral votes no matter how small his victory margin. For example, a candidate who wins Florida by 50.1 to 49.9 percent gets all 27 of its electoral votes, even though half the state voted against him.

Bush cannot claim a mandate with only 51 percent of the vote. Contrary to partisans on both sides, America is not a right-wing country that enthusiastically backs Bush's agenda. Bush won this election, though just barely, because the political right in the United States has long been better organized than the political left.

The left did mount an unprecedented effort against Bush. Never have so many left of center groups—labor unions, environmental, women's, civil rights and kindred organizations—worked with such unity of purpose and abundant funding as during the eighteen month campaign they organized to defeat Bush.

But the left started too late. For decades, its groups had focused on separate issues and immediate battles rather than a broader, unified, long-term agenda. Only the threat of four more years of Bush finally got them to work together. Not so their opponents on the right.

Every day I get up thinking [about] what...I can do today to advance the conservative agenda, Richard Viguerie, the pioneer of direct-mail fundraising and a founder of the modern American conservative movement recently said. We've been doing that for decades, and the left hasn't done that. The left has been thinking of it as a sprint, from election to election.

Viguerie and others set out in 1964 to build a movement that would bring conservatives to power in the United States. They thought big and planned long-term. They created institutions in three areas: think tanks to translate right-wing philosophy into practical slogans and policies; media outlets to spread those ideas to the general population; and grassroots political groups to support candidates who espoused those ideas.

After sixteen years, the right-wing's champion, Ronald Reagan, was elected president. But the right didn't stop. In the 1980s, it created radio, TV and internet outlets that have subsequently pulled the mainstream media and American political discourse in general well to the right.

One result: 42 percent of the American public still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks, even though the bipartisan committee Bush himself appointed to investigate the attacks rejected that assertion. Most of those 42 percent presumably favored Bush for president, giving him an enormous advantage over John Kerry.

Bush should not have won this election. Historically speaking, an incumbent American president burdened with a stagnant economy and an unsuccessful war is usually voted out. What's more, only a third of the public shares Bush's views on such substantive issues as tax cuts and health care. But after decades of strategic organizing, the right has built a political machine capable of marshalling troops and delivering cultural messages about God, guns and gays that lead millions of ordinary Americans to vote against their economic self-interest.

In politics, a well-organized minority often defeats a less organized majority. The American left has finally recognized the importance of doing the kind of unified organizing that brought the right to power. The left's campaign to defeat Bush fell short, but it's not easy to overcome a forty year advantage in a mere eighteen months. Looking ahead, the left should not be condemning ordinary Americans as cretins for giving Bush a second term. It should be out organizing those Americans—building a real movement—so that the margin in future elections is 51 to 49 the other way.