In 1965, Lyndon Johnson could have been excused for believing he had a mandate to alter the course of a nation. He’d defeated Goldwater in the 1964 election 61-38%, carried 44 states and had not been shy about telling a country where he would take it. And there was pent up demand for long-delayed civil rights legislation and an extension of the economic security blanket commenced under Roosevelt. Still, even with the mandate Johnson rightly thought he’d earned, the nation applied brakes to Johnson’s ambitious expansion of the welfare state in the 1966 mid-term elections and turned out of office many of Johnson’s stalwart supporters in Congress.
In 1992, Bill Clinton carried 12 fewer states than Johnson and won by only six points in a year when the country was mired in a recession. Misreading his “mandate,” Clinton tried to nationalize 17% of the U.S. economy, expanded the welfare state, raised taxes, (which prolonged the recession), and engaged in profligate and wasteful stimulus spending that middle America regarded excessive. The nation gave Clinton the back of its hand in the 1994 mid-term elections and installed a Republican majority in Congress that would last a dozen years.
In 2008, Obama carried 28 states (versus Johnson’s 44 and Clinton’s 32), and the popular vote by roughly the same margin as Clinton during the worst recession seen in modern times. He no more has a mandate to socialize the U.S. economy than Clinton did to sanction midnight basketball in every inner-city ghetto in America. Obama was hired to fix the economy, not nationalize it. He was hired to create jobs, not penalize those who do; create wealth, not confiscate the wealth of those who earn it; create opportunities for the next generation, not drown it in a sea of red ink. America is still a fundamentally conservative country, something Obama seems to have forgotten or is choosing to ignore.
Perhaps by rigging the census and granting voting rights to illegals, and by creating a middle class wholly dependent on the federal government for all they have and may ever want, Obama hopes to forestall the inevitable backlash sure to come in the 2010 mid-term elections. But most surely he is sowing the seeds of a new conservative revolution. Indeed, if the recent Rasmussen polls are to be believed, they have already sprouted.
