1/30/01 8:30 a.m.
McCain’s Mandate?
. . . and other post-election lies.

By John J. Pitney Jr., associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of The Art of Political Warfare

cliché of old westerns was the patent medicine salesman who would ride into town, hawking his concoction as the cure for rheumatism, consumption, and every other ailment. In recent months, the 2000 election has become patent medicine in reverse: the ailment for every cure. Public figures of all stripes have been citing the campaign and its murky outcome as a rationale for whatever nostrum they want to peddle.

In most cases, diagnosis and prescription are just as dubious as they were in the days of the traveling snake-oil show.

Campaign finance is one example. The 107th Congress started with a renewed effort to pass the McCain-Feingold bill, which would ban soft money and curb corporate and union spending. Senator Russ Feingold (D., Wisconsin) said: “The extraordinary spending in the 2000 election gives monied interests more influence on the Congress and the President than ever before.”

The idea that monied interests are omnipotent would probably surprise Microsoft, the tobacco industry, and California utility companies. In 1999, Fortune magazine enlisted a liberal Democratic pollster to survey key Washington figures about the sources of interest-group power. “We couldn't find any direct relationship between campaign donations and clout,” he concluded. The most feared lobby in the land — the American Association of Retired Persons — does not even make campaign contributions, instead reaching policymakers through its vast grassroots network.

According to the bill’s sponsors, the voters voiced a strong desire to restrict political money. Last week, Senator John McCain (R., Arizona) said: “After one of the closest elections in our nation's history, there's one thing the American people are unanimous about — they want their government back.” While polls do show vague support for restrictive legislation, people don’t seem to care much. In December, Newsweek asked Americans to rank priorities for the new administration. Campaign-finance reform finished last.

In this context, it’s hard to justify another McCain statement. “The American people have chosen the president of the United States,” he said on January 22. “But I also have a mandate.”

Mandate? What mandate? In 2000, George W. Bush won 36 Republican primaries and 63.2 percent of the total primary vote. McCain won 7 primaries and 30.1 percent. Among the primary voters who did support him, polls showed that his image as a hero and maverick counted much more than his position on campaign finance. If McCain got a mandate in 2000 to reform political money, then Barry Goldwater got a mandate in 1964 to lob a nuclear bomb into the Kremlin men’s room.

The flip side of McCain’s claim to a mandate is the frequent assertion that Bush has no mandate at all. Since no one won a majority of the presidential vote, and since the parties stand at virtual parity on Capitol Hill, some say that the president must not pursue a conservative agenda. Congressional Democrats have instead been talking about a “mandate for cooperation,” and GOP liberals have agreed. In December, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine said: “If there was any mandate in this election, it was that people wanted us to end the partisan bickering.”

Translation: Shut up and cave in.

Granted, political reality will eventually dictate some concessions, but before taking a swig of Cooperation Elixir, Bush should remember the words of Peter Drucker: “One has to start out with what is right rather than what is acceptable . . . precisely because one always has to compromise in the end.”

Anyway he should also recall that Lincoln and Truman managed pretty well with less than 50 percent. Democrats are in a particularly weak position to pursue this line of argument. No Democrat has won a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976 — and no Northern Democrat has done so since FDR in 1944.

So what political ailments did the 2000 election indicate? The weakness of the Electoral College? To the contrary: It actually prevented political chaos by confining recount mania to just a single state. Perhaps the election did point out the need for some jurisdictions to update their voting machinery, but that one technical problem scarcely justifies all the hand-wringing and huckstering that we’ve been hearing since Election Day.