What GOP ‘Mandate’? It’s a Myth : Only 20% of the electorate went Republican; it’s nonsense to say outcome is national will.

Somewhere between 6 o’clock on election night and the early hours of the following day, a myth got set in concrete.

I can be reasonably precise about the earlier time because I was driving south down Route 101 toward San Francisco, listening to the National Public Radio crew mull over election returns on “All Things Considered.” They were pondering what one nervously described as a political paradox: In Virginia, Chuck Robb had beaten off a ferocious challenge by Ollie North by appealing to the traditional constituencies of the Democratic Party--African Americans, blue-collar workers, women.

The NPR pundits raised the possibility that appeals to the old liberal constituencies might not have been so stupid. A few hours later, such talk had been banished from the airwaves and, not long thereafter, from the opinion columns as well.

The following propositions were taken to be self-evident:

* The nation had swung decisively to the right. As with the Reagan victory in 1980, phrases like “seismic upheaval” and “generational shift” were much in vogue.

* President Clinton had sealed his party’s fate by betraying the New Democrat pledges of 1992 and swerving to the left.

* The only recipe for Democratic salvation was for President and party to seek to recapture the “center,” by being harder on crime, welfare recipients, poor people and other outcasts from the social contract.

All of this is the most outstanding nonsense. There was no more of a seismic shift than there was in 1980.

In terms of absolute numbers, the vote in House races split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans.

With New Democrats trying to outflank their Republican opponents on crime, welfare bashing and ridiculing of “government,” while ignoring the economic travails of traditionally liberal voters, many of those voters stayed home.

African Americans boycotted the polls at twice the average rate. Their turnout, at 38%, was down 12 points from 1992.

And the notion of Clinton running a leftist White House is ludicrous. The pundit elite may have brainwashed itself into believing that, but blue-collar workers saw a corpocrat who shoved NAFTA down their throats; African Americans heard two years’ worth of calculated insults, stretching back to Clinton’s premeditated affronts to Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah, and environmentalists saw their causes suffer the worst two years of the past quarter-century.

With terms like centrist and moderate, political vocabulary has now been voided of all useful meaning, but the bottom line is that Clinton ran a White House servile to the priorities of Wall Street and big business.

In fact, the election was a stunning rebuff to the New Democrats. They lost their races at twice the rate of their more liberal Democratic colleagues. Their leaders--Sen. Jim Sasser of Tennessee, Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma--crashed to defeat.

But the clamor about the supposed conservative earthquake is serving exactly the same function as it did in 1980 and 1981: the creation of a collective mood among the elite opinion-formers that to oppose right-wing policies is to flout the clear mandate of the people.

Notwithstanding demagogues like Newt Gingrich, there was no such mandate. The Republicans won the support of about 20% of all Americans entitled to vote. More than 100 million citizens didn’t vote at all.

As one might have predicted, the stampede strategy has already cowed a President whose political backbone, even at the best of times, has the consistency of marshmallow.

Clinton has opened the door to school prayer. He has pledged ferocity on welfare. He’ll probably support a balanced-budget amendment, a truly insane economic strategy that will ravage Medicaid, Medicare and ultimately Social Security, and stifle long-term economic recovery.

As a matter of desperate urgency, the left has to rally against the right and if necessary, against a sellout President loath to fight back with veto and filibuster.

As a first step, the left should proclaim that there is no right-wing mandate nationally, any more than there was a mandate for the immigrant-hating Proposition 187 in the Pajaro Valley farm town of Watsonville, near which I once lived. Watsonville voted yes on 187, but with the support of just 3,144 out of an over-18 city population of 21,523. Is 14.6% of the potential vote a mandate for hate in one city, or 20% a true mandate in a nation?