POLK? TRY FDR:

Mead: Bush Re-election Is 'Catastrophic' Defeat for Democrats: Walter Russell Mead, a leading analyst of American politics and foreign policy, describes the defeat of nominee John Kerry and his fellow Democrats in the November 2 presidential and legislative elections as "catastrophic" and "astonishing." (He was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on November 3, 2004, Council on Foreign Relations)

What are your first impressions of President Bush's re-election?

I think it is a catastrophic result for the Democrats. The party lost seats in the Senate, lost seats in the House, did not pick up any governorships. The Senate Minority Leader, [Thomas] Daschle [D-S.D.], lost. And Bush, in the middle of an unpopular war that's not going particularly well, with the price of oil over $50 a barrel and the most negative drumbeat of stories I can remember about foreign policy, wins with a popular vote majority of 3.5 million. It's astonishing. [...]

Even though Kerry won a lot of electoral votes from big states like New York, Illinois, and California, there seems to be a disconnect between the broad mass of voters and the Democratic Party establishment.

Another thing to think about is that the states that the Democrats are winning are states that continue to lose population. If this time Bush had won exactly the same states he won last time, and Kerry won exactly the same states [as Democratic nominee Al Gore won in the 2000 election], Bush's electoral count would've been up by eight because of the redistricting that comes after the census. So six years from now we'll have another census, and presumably a state like Arizona will gain electoral votes, while states like Massachusetts, New York--it used to be the biggest state in the union, when I was a kid--will continue to lose electoral votes. The power is tilting away from the Democratic establishment, the Democratic parts of the country, to these new places and new people.

At this point, are you able to speculate a bit on Bush's place in history? He is obviously a strong campaigner.

I think a lot is going to depend on the situation in Iraq. Bush essentially has no excuses now: he has a mandate, he has both houses of Congress, and he is in full control of the foreign policy machinery. The war in Iraq is one that he chose, that he planned, that he has led. Bush is going to look pretty good if even two years from now Iraq is more or less pacified, and there is a government that is at least, in some ways, better than Saddam Hussein, and you have an island of stability in the middle of the Middle East. In retrospect he will look like a visionary, and people will forget all the ups and downs. When people now think of the Mexican War, they think about it as this quick, glorious dash. But in fact [President James] Polk had terrible problems during the Mexican War [1846-1848].

Polk too was a Jacksonian but did not radically reform on the domestic front and couldn't even stand for a second term.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2004 7:49 AM