A Precarious Victory : When is a Winner a Loser? When He Lacks a Mandate

Could Tuesday’s winner be history’s loser? If so, the Democrat’s bitter debate about the future may be unwarranted.

The party came out of this year’s presidential election defeat with a plausible explanation--Michael S. Dukakis--and some grounds for optimism: the partial erosion of the GOP presidential coalition, simultaneous Democratic gains in Congress and vivid weakness in President-elect George Bush’s mandate.

Mandate, in fact, hardly seems the term. A fair percentage of those voting for George Herbert Walker Bush told pollsters how unhappy they’d been with their choice. Congressional Democrats, in turn, are aware that with their own pickups, they can claim a countermandate. And they know that third successive terms for a party in the White House are often weak. On Wednesday morning, the President-elect chuckled his precedent-setting thanks to Martin Van Buren, the last sitting vice president to be elected to the White House back in 1836. But Bush may not know the rest of the story. Van Buren was a one-term failure, a second-echelon politician with good handlers who couldn’t escape the shadow of the towering figure who preceded him--Andrew Jackson.

Besides, there’s always the tantalizing thesis of New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo: The President elected in 1988 may turn out to be a second Herbert Hoover. Of course it’s partly a Democratic excuse--but it’s also a possibility. Although no one can translate it into statistics or percentages, the conceivable 1989-92 implosion of the now 71-month-old economic recovery should be taken seriously.

Washington resonates with a new common wisdom that Bush will face bitterness in Congress because of the negative, attack-dog quality of the Bush campaign. In fact, the problem for the GOP--and the theoretical opportunity for the Democrats--could be even more substantial.

Let’s begin with the central anomaly in this election: the unprecedented divergence between the presidential results--53.8% for Bush--and the Democratic gains in U.S. Senate, House and gubernatorial elections. That hasn’t happened before this century. The party taking the White House has gained on at least one or two of the other levels--often on all three. The closest precedent was back in 1960, when John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon by a hairbreadth, while Kennedy’s Democrats lost 22 House seats and two senators and gained just one governor. Since then, of course, it has emerged that Nixon might actually have won, because of vote theft in Illinois and Texas.

At any rate, the disparity suggests that 1988’s presidential result may have partly been a fluke. The Democrats could arguably have won and gained across the board if their standard-bearer hadn’t run such an appalling campaign. Recrimination has eased because Dukakis redeemed himself a bit in the last 10 days, reducing the gap with economic populism and tough attacks on a vulnerable Bush.

But that mini-success only underscores Dukakis’ incredible strategic failure of late July, August and September: His refusal to continue other Democrats’ scathing attacks on Bush, the Reagan Administration, its various scandals--Iran-Contra, Manuel A. Noriega, the Pentagon arms deals, Michael K. Deaver-Lyn Nofziger, et al.--and the precariousness of Reaganomics that had created such a favorable Democratic situation in the July polls. More was involved than Dukakis’ 18-point poll margin after the Atlanta convention; that lead, in turn, rested on Ronald Reagan’s own mediocre (51%-53%) job-approval level, plus widespread public concern that the United States was on the wrong track and the next President must pursue new policies.

Unwillingness to maintain this indictment was Dukakis’ fatal blunder. By Labor Day, his inept managerialist campaign had let the Republicans up off the canvas to regain the initiative in a way reminiscent of the 1948 Republican presidential nominee, Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, dissipating a post-convention lead of 15 points to finally lose by 3. No other midsummer leader had ever blown a 15-point edge before or since--until Dukakis. The Massachusetts governor, dropping from an 18-point lead to an 8-point loss, makes Dewey look like Machiavelli. Dukakis will never be in the White House--but he deserves to get into the Guinness Book of World Records.

If Dukakis bears three-quarters of the responsibility for turning Democratic opportunity into a smaller tide operating only below the presidency, the Republicans are left with a related problem. Not only did voters convey to pollsters an unprecedentedly harsh reaction to having to choose between Bush and Dukakis, but for the first time the opposition party can claim its own countertide in Congress.

Bush, too, has his string of firsts to go into the political record book. He is the first new Republican President to win office while losing strength in both houses of Congress; the first postwar GOP President to see his party simultaneously lose net House seats in the South, and the first 20th-Century GOP President to see the number of GOP House members elected with him drop into the 175 range. Capitol Hill Democratic tacticians are already poisoning their Florentine daggers.

Make no mistake. Bush does have some mandate. It’s to be experienced, conduct a reasonably tough foreign policy, pledge allegiance and keep murderer Willie Horton under lock and key. As for no tax increases, however, the President-elect has only a pseudo-mandate. Half of the people who voted for him didn’t believe him. However, the biggest demand on Bush may be the most challenging: keep alive the economic recovery and prosperity he has described with more GOP self-congratulation and implied political warranty than anyone since Hoover in 1928.

Democrats, in turn, are clearly praying for the rest of that Hoover analogy. But even without this vague peril, Tuesday catalogued some important signs of weakness in the Republican presidential coalition shaped in 1968-72 and revitalized under Reagan. The principal geographic erosion is in the upper Midwest and the Pacific, where even Dukakis carried three states--Wisconsin, Iowa and Oregon--that went Republican in the opening-round GOP presidential victory of 1968. And even Dukakis almost won in California, Illinois and Missouri. The party coalition is now overconcentrated in Dixie. These constitute distinctly negative tea leaves in the bottom of the 1988 GOP national cup.

Another bad omen is the way GOP strategists, convinced they couldn’t sell Bush as Bush, relied on ripping off old scabs to resurrect cultural, racial and patriotic issues that had swung key Democratic constituencies into the GOP presidential coalition during the 1968-72 formative years. In a sense, the harsh Bush attack ads that hit Dukakis on “flags and furloughs” were the 1988 equivalent of the “Waving the Bloody Shirt” rhetoric used by late 19th-Century Republicans to keep old Civil War GOP loyalties throbbing.

It could be a strategic last hurrah. The White House won’t be able to run Willie Horton commercials against congressional Democrats or Japanese money managers wondering whether to keep bailing out U.S. international debts. This means the Achilles’ heels already apparent in Reagan economic ratings, bond market nervousness and the peripheral erosion of the GOP coalition in 1988, may pose their real threat in 1990 and 1992. The economic-electoral stakes have been doubled, redoubled--and postponed.

Historical precedents, alas, pose another problem for Bush. The truth about the results of one party extending its White House tenure through a third term is that it often doesn’t work. The most frequent pattern is that of the second-banana politico elected to follow the two terms of one of his party’s most popular leaders: Van Buren, as mentioned, laid an egg following Jackson. William Howard Taft couldn’t make it in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt. Hoover, as well, was one who presided over his party’s third straight term. By that time the prior Administration’s chickens are coming home to roost.

So Democrats may have more to cheer about than pundits acknowledge. They have a small Washington mandate of their own, but without meaningful responsibility--and four years to see if Cuomo is right about the 1988 losers being winners for the rest of the century. After all, pitfalls of a failed presidential campaign pale beside those of a failed presidency.