Transcript
TOM MANN: It has been a busy few days for all of us, election night and the days since. It is always fascinating for me to see how talk evolves over the hours and days after an election, first for some people the shock of the results, for others, a sort of satisfaction that it turned out exactly as they thought it would. But nonetheless, almost immediately you begin to see the effort to define the meaning of the election, the so-called mandate, which, as you know, is not an objective reality, but is the story told by the winners and accepted more widely.
In fact, the initial statements of Speaker-Designate Pelosi, of Majority Leader-Designate Reid and President Bush, all indicated they were pretty much on the same wavelength. But it is important in our initial analyses to try to understand the vote and what actually happened, and then we begin looking out ahead toward what the policy implications are likely to be, and what the longer-term political implications are as well. I think we are now at a state on Friday morning as opposed to Wednesday morning where we are really going to be able to begin looking ahead and trying to make an informed, sober assessment of how this change in political arrangements and political dynamics will affect our politics and policy over the next couple of years.
There is really a sense of relief I think among many people that our system demonstrated that it retains a capacity for democratic accountability. If we would have gone into a midterm election with as an angry and sour a public mood as we had with all of those indicators of a negative referendum and generated a swing in the national popular vote comparable to, actually larger, I think, than 1994, similar to 1974, 1958, 1966, 1982, if we would have done all of that and then saw that it did not translate into seat pick-ups that would have changed the political alignment, there would have been a sense that our system is so rigid because of the vast uncompetitive terrain in our electoral system that the public no longer had the capacity to send a strong signal. There were a lot of people who expected that, who worried about it and rightly so, but we demonstrated that there is enough flexibility in the system especially with the rough parity between the parties for that to happen, and to actually get a change in party control in both House and Senate makes the results of the election unambiguous in the most fundamental sense.
We do have kind of self-correcting mechanisms available in our system. It does not tell us much about who will win the 2008 Presidential election; it does not in any way determine whether one party or another will break out of this position of parity. It does tell us, I think, that the ambitions of President Bush to build a large and enduring Republican majority have not been realized and will not be realized in his time in office, but that battle will certainly go on.
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