President Obama and YouTube

This article reviews President Obama's well-known embrace of YouTube. This medium allows the President to continue to connect and engage with many of his most passionate supporters. (Click title to go directly to the article)

Obama's Mandate

Americans have become accustomed to seeing “mandates” in victories of presidential candidates. With the exception of anomalous races such as 2000, it is usually possible for the winning side to claim a “mandate” of one sort or another. Creating a precise definition of what a mandate is can be difficult, though, and it has been a subject of much debate among political scientists and others. Robert Dahl, for example, challenges the very notion of presidential mandates.http://transition.cqpress.com/assets/MandateControversy.htm. Andrew Busch observes that defining a mandate is a most subjective enterprise, and that one person’s mandate might be someone else’s narrow victory. http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/busch/04/mandates.html Even a landslide such as Nixon’s trouncing of McGovern in 1972 raises the “mandate” question insofar as Nixon’s personal victory did not translate into the Republicans winning control of the House and the Senate. Any discussion of presidential mandates, then, must define precisely what mandates are and how they are determined before doing anything else.

In my view, several criteria must be met for a new President to have a mandate. First, he must have received more than 300 electoral votes and a majority of all popular votes cast. Next, he must have shown the ability to translate his victory into additional seats for his party in the House and the Senate. Third, he must have improved upon the performance of the last nominee of his party in terms of the popular votes and the electoral vote. Finally, he must have won a diverse array of demographic groups across the electorate. In all of these respects, Barack Obama clearly won a mandate in the November 2008 elections.

Whether President Obama has maintained his mandate can be measured by how well he is doing in the polls. The most recent Gallup Poll shows him with a job approval rating of 61%, which is down from two months ago, but higher than the 52.9% of the popular vote he won in November 2008. Given the boost that Presidents usually get from overseas trips, his approval rating is likely to be higher upon his return from the G20 Summit.

The President also acts as one who has a powerful mandate. He worked quickly to craft and win passage of the gigantic stimulus package. He has also proposed an ambitious, costly and controversial agenda of additional legislation, including health care reform. The President has felt emboldened to take a new, tougher approach with the U.S. auto industry.

The key to the survival of the President’s popularity, and his mandate, is the success of his stimulus package. Should his programs prove successful in improving the U.S. economy he will remain popular, and Democrats in Congress will continue to support his programs, and voters will reward the Democrats with even larger majorities in the next Congress. If his programs prove unsuccessful, his approval ratings and mandate will decline, and Democrats will begin to “run for cover” by opposing his policies.

An Analysis of Bill Clinton's 1996 Re-election

Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election victory was historic for several reasons. He was the first (and only) Democratic president reelected to a second term since Franklin Roosevelt 60 years earlier. Despite the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, in which the Republicans wrested control of both the House and the Senate from Democrats, Bill Clinton won a resounding, if not landslide victory. After winning just 43% of the popular vote in the three-way Clinton/Bush/Perot race of 1992, Bill Clinton received 49.2% of the popular vote in 1996 and 379 electoral votes. An analysis of the election reveals several reasons for his success; analysis of polling data reveals the breadth of his victory. In looking at the data from 1996, it is clear that while Bill Clinton was adept at insuring his own political success, he was not necessarily building a strong Democratic party.

Clinton’s success was due in part to the “double Southern strategy” of the Clinton/Gore ticket (Arkansas/Tennessee). Clinton and Gore won the reliably Democratic Northeast, Midwest and West, while building on the Clinton/Gore base in the upper South. The perennial Democratic problem since the mid-1960s (except for Jimmy Carter) of being “shut out” in the South was avoided.

Bill Clinton’s communication skills are also unsurpassed, as anyone who has heard him (including this author) can attest. He is equally profound, and moving, in a large group, small group, with audiences of any age or race, with people of any social class. He can make almost any group feel that he empathizes with and cares about them. The honorable, yet less gifted Senator Dole was simply outperformed in almost every step of the campaign by President Clinton.

As a leader of the centrist, Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton consciously strove to moderate the policies of the Democratic Party and his presidency, particularly in the election year of 1996. In that year alone, working with the Republican-led House and Senate, he signed into law such measures as the Communications Decency Act (to control pornography), the Defense of Marriage Act (to allow states to ban gay marriage), and, most importantly, the Welfare Reform Act. Clinton positioned himself as a social and economic conservative while maintaining the loyalty of traditionally Democratic groups.

A comparison of exit poll data between the 1992 and 1996 elections reveals the success of Clinton’s strategies, and the astonishing breadth of his reelection victory. Clinton lost support among only two demographic groups, and only by small margins. (He lost support among those over 60 from 50% to 48% and among Jews from 80% to 78 %.)
Among every other group his support remained at the same level or rose considerably.
Particularly notable were the dramatic increases in support he received among the following groups from 1992 to 1996: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/exit-polls.html


Women (from 45% to 54%)

Whites (39 to 43%)

Hispanics (61 to 72%)

No high school ((54 to 59%)

Some college (41 to 48%)

Protestant (36 to 41%)

Big Cities (58 to 68%)

Suburbs (41 to 47%)


Rural (39 to 44%)



Clinton’s broad victory among almost every demographic group defied many expectations. Considering that the Republicans retained control of Congress in 1996, and that the Democrats lost the White House in the next two presidential elections, Clinton’s 1996 reelection victory certainly stands out as a testimony to his personal political skills, rather than his ability to lead his party.

The Green Party and Foreign Policy

In the view of many, including myself, bipartisanship has declined. But for some Americans, such as the Green party, the Democrats and Republicans are still Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Here are the views of the Greens on foreign policy, which would be anathema to both parties.


http://www.gp.org/first100/?cat=16

The State of Bipartisanship Today

In the last half of the 20th century the United States enjoyed a golden age of bipartisanship. When it came to the Cold War, politics truly did stop “at the waters’ edge,” with such momentous Congressional actions as the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan and Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. While the Democratic Party eventually suffered internal division over the Vietnam War, Republicans and Democrats remained committed to the central Cold War principle of containment until the fall of the Berlin Wall, even while they disagreed about levels of defense spending or strategies for waging the Cold War. On the domestic side, both parties essentially agreed on the need to maintain the old New Deal safety net until the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. As late as the 1980s, as Hetherington and Keefe observe (153) there was considerable “heterogeneity and overlap” between the parties. While this classic, mid-twentieth century bipartisanship has likely gone the way of the slide rule, there are many who persist in calling for bipartisanship, for a variety of reasons.

The earlier bipartisanship is unlikely to be duplicated in the near future. The sharpest fault line between the parties, going back to the rise of the Reagan conservatives in the 1980s, remains economics. As we see with the Republican reaction to the Democratic stimulus package, Republicans remained wedded to the supply-side mantras of “lower taxes” and “cut spending,” as Democrats embrace Keynesianism unbound. The current recession has only deepened the chasm between the parties.

The moderates, or at least those willing to reach across the aisle and join forces in bipartisanship, are fewer in numbers. The old southern, conservative Democrats have virtually disappeared. The eastern “Rockefeller” and “Percy” liberal Republicans are also a vanishing breed. There are the mavericks of both parties, especially in the Senate, still willing to work out deals, but not as much as in the past.

So why, then, is there such a strong, persistent chorus for bipartisanship, particularly from the chattering class? The recent presidential election, with “maverick” McCain and “post partisan” Obama, revived hopes that a new bipartisan era beckoned. There is also, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a Salon piece, a great deal of confusion about just what bipartisanship really means. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/24/bipartisanship/ Perhaps the most incisive analysis of the state of bipartisanship today, though, comes from David Broder, who argues that it is both possible and necessary today, although alliances will shift repeatedly on an issue-by-issue basis. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/feb/19/bipartisanship-remains-crucial/