Perhaps the wisest assessment of Tuesday’s election came from an unlikely source, the oft-irresponsible Senate Majority Leader, Nevada’s Harry Reid. “This is a mandate to get along, to get something done in a bipartisan way,” he said. “This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology.”
The reason it’s not an ideological mandate of the sort given to the conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980 is because, unlike Reagan (who also won a much bigger victory), the liberal Barack Obama did as much to shade his ideology as to proclaim it. He continually pledged to soften differences, not to stress them. And he consistently emphasized proposals more often associated with conservatives than liberals: tax cuts, greater numbers of military personnel, and a “net spending cut” for the federal government (even if his spending numbers never came close to adding up). In short, despite what the liberal “Center for American Progress” claimed in a triumphant day-after report, this victory certainly was not “a progressive mandate.”
The blurring of philosophical differences was even easier for Obama because President George W. Bush and some Republican porkmeisters in Congress had already blurred those distinctions for him through their big-spending ways, and also because of weariness of the Iraq war that crossed ideological lines. Yet polls continue to show that Americans prefer a less intrusive government to an activist one, and even liberal MSNBC reported that Tuesday’s exit polls showed that more Americans consider themselves conservative, 34 percent, than liberal, 22 percent. Combined with the 44 percent of self-proclaimed moderates, those numbers indicate that the United States remains a decidedly center-right country.
Also, as was explained by National Review’s Byron York, a monthly Examiner columnist, a straightforward analysis of the exit polls showed that the vote for Obama was a vote as much for racial progress as for his specific policies. York noted that of those who said Obama’s race played an important role in their choice of a candidate, far more of them voted for Obama than against him — in state after state after state. It stands to reason that some of those “racial reconciliation” voters will balk if Obama and the Reid/Nancy Pelosi congressional leadership start trying to force leftist policies into law. If Obama governs from the center, he can be a success. If he governs from the left, his honeymoon will end rather quickly.
