EVERY 72 YEARS:

America's Choice: Can Bush reshape policy and politics like Lincoln and FDR did? (MICHAEL BARONE, November 6, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

We have just come through a historic election. In 1864, a year of hundreds of thousands of Union casualties, voters in the 25 of 36 states that voted that year re-elected Abraham Lincoln by a popular vote margin of 55% to 45%. In 1944, another year of hundreds of thousands of American casualties, voters in 48 states re-elected Franklin D. Roosevelt by a partisan majority of 53% to 46%. The margin would have been greater if Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress had acted to enable millions of servicemen to vote. This year, after two years in which we have suffered a thousand deaths and several thousand injuries, Americans voted by what now appears to be a 51% to 48% majority for George W. Bush. That majority may be increased if the military votes are counted, contrary to what Democrats attempted to do in Florida in 2000 and what Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell has been doing this year. [...]

The 2004 election was fought after nearly a decade of deadlock between the two parties. Bill Clinton was re-elected with 49% of the vote; the presidential race of 2000 was a 48% to 48% tie; the popular vote for the House was about 49% to 48% Republican in 1996, 1998 and 2000. In 2002, when Mr. Bush's job approval was much higher than today, but when the economy and the stock market were in much worse shape, the Republicans won the House vote by a margin of 51% to 46%. Mr. Bush's popular vote margin and the House results look to be in just the same neighborhood as the 2002 results. But they are majorities. They are similar to the 51% to 47% margin by which William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan in 1896--Karl Rove's favorite election, because it led to a 34-year dominance of American politics by the Republican Party. A majority, albeit not a big one, can be a powerful force in American politics and policy. The question is what Mr. Bush and his party--fortified by gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives--will make of it.

Lincoln and Roosevelt set their parties on the course to become majority forces in American politics and public policy even as their wars raged on. Lincoln's Republicans passed the homestead and land grant college laws, authorized construction of the transcontinental railroad and passed civil rights acts which, alas, proved ineffective at guaranteeing the rights of black Americans. Roosevelt's Democrats passed the G.I. Bill of Rights, which subsidized college education for returning veterans, and the FHA and VA home-mortgage guarantees, which transformed America from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners. All of these policies encouraged, subsidized and honored upwardly mobile behavior on the part of millions of Americans for a generation or more--and in the process enabled Lincoln's Republicans and Roosevelt's Democrats to become, for a long generation or more, America's majority party.

During the 2000 campaign and during this campaign year Mr. Bush has set forward proposals to reshape public policy and, in the process, to reshape American politics. He has already had some success. On education he has called not just for spending more money--on that framing of the issue Democrats always win--but for insisting on achievement and accountability. That has become law, thanks in part to Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, who are genuinely dismayed by the low achievement levels of their low-income constituents: We measure not just inputs but outputs. On taxes Mr. Bush has, with the indispensable help of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas--a community college professor a quarter-century ago, now a major policy maker; such is the upward mobility possible in American politics--enacted massive tax cuts that free up the private sector to provide the economic growth indispensable to the success of the millions who start off behind.

This year Mr. Bush laid out, late in the campaign in my view and too sketchily for the taste of policy mavens, domestic policy reforms as ambitious and capable of reshaping America as Lincoln's and Roosevelt's.

FDR campaigned in '32 on a balanced budget, not on the New Deal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 6, 2004 11:00 AM