To Elect Or Not Elect

That is the question. No, Dartboard is not talking about the Undergraduate Council elections. Dartboard has yet to recuperate from the nightmare of election night 2004.

To be fair, it’s not like Dartboard has been given much chance to recover. The American media has been making ominous forecasts day after day regarding judicial nominees, a flat tax and the forthcoming war on Iran. (That country is, after all, just one letter away and right next door to that other country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11.)

But the most infuriating discussion over the past month has concerned whether or not President Bush’s 51 percent reelection victory amounted to a mandate. And if so, Republicans suggest that Democrats might as well just lie down and acquiesce to the almighty, now-pretty-much-legitimately-elected king. Dartboard is not amused.

Sure, Bush has a mandate to be president. A majority of voters did, after all, seem to reelect him. It doesn’t matter that it is completely incomprehensible what, if anything, all those people were thinking. What does matter is that they voted for him over the other guy. They wanted to elect him president, and he has a mandate to stay in power.

But that’s not what Republicans mean when they say Bush has a mandate. They mean, as Bush so eloquently put it after the election, he has amassed a large new reserve of political capital. And Bush has begun to make hints that he’s ready for a spending spree. (Both literally and figuratively.)

The problem is that for most voters, the question they were posed at the polls did not extend much further than “to elect or not elect”—to no fault of their own. Bush did not campaign on any substantive platform. He vowed to “revamp” the tax code and make it simpler and more efficient. He vowed to “finish the job” in Iraq. He vowed to stand for good ol’ American values. But unfortunately none of those things give Bush license to do much of anything.

Dartboard is reminded of Robert Reich’s criticism of President Clinton’s second term reelection strategy, which was equally vapid and mandate-free. Rather than asking the electorate to consider a course of action on anything of importance, he chose to make light of tiny “focus group”-tested issues like v-chips and the Internet. Once elected with no real second-term agenda, he had nothing with which to lobby congress.

Bush faces the same challenge. When it comes to the tax code, he cannot make the case that voters support any single plan—particularly any plan that raises taxes on the middle class. When it comes to Iraq, Bush never offered voters any new approaches (and Kerry never clearly defined any alternatives). If Republicans think Bush has a mandate to invade other countries, they must be delusional to think that question was somehow on the ballot. As for the values thing—well, maybe Bush has a mandate there. But as billions of words of text on this page and others have articulated, “down home values” do not necessarily translate into support for packing the courts with pro-life judges or amending the federal constitution to bar same-sex marriage.

Dartboard would say, however, that Bush has a mandate in one area—that most oft-cited reason for voting Bush over Kerry: People would just rather have a beer with (the recovering alcoholic) Bush than (the craggy war hero) Kerry. Dartboard for one disagrees, but at least Dartboard can appreciate the logic. If Bush’s mandate extends only so far as taking millions of people out for beer, things could be, at least, far worse.

—BENJAMIN J. TOFF