Many Elections Turned on Symbols and Emotions, Not Specific Policies : Few Presidents Have Ever Had a Clear Mandate

“During the whole of this period the electorate played a game of blind man’s bluff. . . . And the political leaders preferred to raise fake (issues) and attempt to be all things to all men, rather than tie up parties to the real forces that were transforming the country, and which, in any case, they did not understand.”

That observation, by historians Henry Steele Commager and the late Samuel Eliot Morison, was made about the state of American politics fully 100 years ago, but it reflects an enduring fact about presidential election campaigns:

There has almost always been a gap between the way such battles are theoretically supposed to be carried out and the way they are actually waged.

Poses Serious Problems

And that gap, as big this year as in any quadrennial in recent memory, could pose serious problems for the new President just as it did for many earlier chief executives.

In theory, a presidential campaign is supposed to be a sober, detailed discussion of the policies and programs each candidate would pursue on the major issues facing the country. After such a national debate, the winner would enter the White House with a clear expression of public support for his programs--in short, a “mandate.”

In fact, history suggests that a great many presidential elections have turned on symbols and emotions that had little direct bearing on the specific policy choices and decisions the new chief executive would face. As a result, relatively few presidents have taken office with clear policy mandates.

“These so-called mandates are usually pretty tenuous,” said Robert Ferrell, biographer of President Harry S. Truman and retired professor of history at Indiana University. “When you’ve got an overwhelming vote, you can claim it, but it rarely happens.”

Indeed, some experts question the whole idea of a “mandate.” It’s a “mystical word,” says William Leuchtenberg of the University of North Carolina, biographer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “It has an Oriental flavor to it. I think of the writings of Confucius.”

Empty Campaigns

Certainly history is filled with substantively empty campaigns. In 1840, for instance, William Henry Harrison won the White House with an appeal to frontier voters as the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate, although in fact he’d been born on a Tidewater plantation in Virginia.

In 1920, Warren G. Harding brushed aside the serious problems that flowed from World War I and centered a successful presidential campaign on the vague pledge to “return to normalcy.” He then minded the store in such a desultory fashion that his Administration was destroyed by the Teapot Dome scandal.

Just four years ago, President Reagan, resisting any temptation to be specific, stuck to his theme of “morning in America.”

Indeed, on the rare occasions when one party has tried to run an election as a referendum on a major issue, the results have sometimes been disastrous--as in 1860, when the election set the stage for Civil War. Or misleading, as in 1916, when Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection as the President who had “kept us out of war.” A mere five months after the election, events forced Wilson to repudiate that implied promise for the future and lead the country into World War I.

Fashion a Mandate

And so whether Vice President George Bush or Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis wins today, either one will face a task that will have been faced often in the past: How does a President fashion a mandate out of the usually equivocal returns of an election?

For Bush, the problem of defining a mandate could be particularly difficult and, at the same time, unusually important.

Most of his campaign has been based on pledges to continue the Reagan record. But while Reagan remains personally popular, his Administration since the “morning in America” reelection has largely ceded the initiative on domestic policy to Congress.

From catastrophic health insurance to new trade legislation and proposals on day care, virtually every major domestic initiative in the last three years has been shaped by congressional Democrats. Basing a campaign on that record poses problems for Bush in defining his own course.

Moreover, polls continue to show that while voters appear to prefer Bush to Dukakis, they are not deeply attached to either man. A record low turnout, which many political scientists are forecasting, could further reduce the new President’s claim of broad popular support.

Little Support

At the same time, Bush might need a well-defined mandate more than many other presidents, for he seems likely to be elected with less support in Congress than, perhaps, any other President in this century.

The same polls that show Bush leading also show that the Democrats will almost certainly retain control of both the House and the Senate and may even gain seats. In this century, no other President except Gerald R. Ford, who was not elected, has begun his term with the opposition party in such a strong position on Capitol Hill.

Even within his own party, Bush faces substantial competing power centers, most notably the Senate’s Republican leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, who ran against Bush in the primaries.

So far, Bush and his aides have been reluctant to talk much about what his mandate might be. Their overwhelming concern has been to avoid seeming overconfident and to avoid the sorts of specific commitments that might give Dukakis a last-minute issue.

“I can’t comment on mandate,” Bush said at his last press conference, on Oct. 16. “I can’t even start contemplating beyond Nov. 8.”

Use Them as Swords

And yet, both presidents and their opponents seem to find the idea of a mandate irresistible. Presidents can use them as swords against those who would oppose their programs. Conversely, their opponents can sometimes use the question of a mandate as a shield to fend off presidential programs they claim the country did not approve.

Roosevelt’s “mandate,” for example, became an issue in 1937 when he tried to get the size of the Supreme Court increased so he could pack it with justices who supported the New Deal. Opponents claimed he had no mandate for such a sweeping change, which had never been discussed during the 1936 campaign, and Roosevelt lost.

Liberal supporters of President John F. Kennedy, by contrast, used the idea of a mandate defensively. They explained the young President’s foot-dragging pace on civil rights by saying his narrow election victory had not provided a mandate to move faster.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose enormous popularity yielded two overwhelming victories, entitled the first volume of his memoirs “Mandate for Change.” But “in fact there wasn’t much change,” says historian Stephen Ambrose of the University of New Orleans, author of biographies of Eisenhower and President Richard M. Nixon.

Eisenhower also demonstrated how ambiguity can allow a determined President to claim a mandate for almost any policy he wants, Ambrose notes. In the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower, who had been the supreme allied commander of forces in Europe during World War II, pledged he would “go to Korea” to end the war that began there in 1949.

Arguments for Both Sides

“But he never said what he would do when he got there,” says Ambrose. “That meant the hawks could say, ‘Gee, Gen. Eisenhower, going to Korea, that means we’re going to win,’ and the doves could say, ‘Old Ike, he’ll end it.’ ”

In that respect at least, Eisenhower could serve as a model for either of the two current candidates. Bush, for example, has talked in a general way about education, environmental protection and negotiations to ban chemical and biological weapons. A strong-willed new President might be able to convert those remarks into a mandate.

Historians, however, tend to think Bush and Dukakis have carried vagueness too far.

The current election has been “pitiful,” Commager said.

“It may not be a difference in kind,” said Leuchtenberg, noting the many non-substantive campaigns in the past, but “it is a difference in degree.”

‘Worst I’ve Ever Seen’

“This is not the first campaign in which the candidates have not been specific, but I must say, this is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Ambrose said.

And a brief list of issues that Bush and Dukakis have failed to address supports that assessment.

In the area of national defense, for example, nearly all military experts concede that the Pentagon has ordered far more weapons than the current defense budget, large as it is, can pay for. And most agree that the vast majority of those weapons will be needed to meet the country’s existing global commitments.

But while both candidates acknowledge that defense spending, at best, will be held steady over the next decade, neither has suggested ways of reducing U.S. commitments to meet budget restraints or, on the other hand, convincing U.S. allies to pick up more of the burden.

Similarly, the candidates have ignored questions of Third World development and debt, even though that debt continues to threaten the international banking system and underdevelopment keeps hundreds of millions of people destitute.

Failed to Address Poverty

At home, neither candidate has systematically addressed the complicated and persistent issue of urban poverty.

Nor have they talked in depth about an issue that many public policy analysts say could become the most pressing domestic problem facing government in the next decade--the rocketing cost of health care.

Dukakis has offered a plan to give more Americans access to whatever health-care system exists--reaching the 37 million or so who currently do not have health insurance. But neither he nor Bush has addressed the more complex question of what sort of health-care system the nation can afford.

Finally, in the area of the environment, neither candidate has talked much about such global threats as the increase in the “greenhouse effect,” which threatens a slow but steady, and destructive, increase in world temperatures.

“It will be very hard for either candidate to claim any mandate,” Leuchtenberg said. “It’s not clear that either of these men have a program they want to put through.”