Nicholas Confessore: How Bush Is Breaking the Rules By Going for Broke without a Mandate (NYT)

Nicholas Confessore, in the NYT (2-7-05):

... Most transformative presidents of the past have acted with the wind at their backs. When he set out to birth the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed high approval ratings and Congressional majorities that were gigantic by today's standards. Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the shock of President Kennedy's assassination to pass the Great Society legislation. And the public was already deeply disillusioned with détente when Ronald Reagan set out to upend American policy toward the Soviet Union.

When presidents set out to move a recalcitrant public toward their point of view, they usually took care to lay the groundwork first. Woodrow Wilson won only a 42 percent plurality in 1912, in a three-way election. When it came time to push through large-scale tariff reform through Congress in 1913, he took the radical step of appearing personally before a joint session, which no president had done since John Adams.

When Roosevelt moved to bring the Unitd States into World War II, he started small, pitching his"lend-lease" program as a limited effort to let Great Britain borrow arms and matériel. The comparison to Roosevelt is not lost on Mr. Bush's supporters, many of whom have cast his sweeping proposals for an"ownership society" as the conservative inverse of Roosevelt's New Deal. But Roosevelt also suffered humiliating setbacks when he confused high approval ratings with an unfettered mandate, and tried to pack the Supreme Court following his landslide victory in 1936.

A closer parallel to Mr. Bush's first four years might be those of James Polk, who won office narrowly in 1844 and applied himself to four well defined but ambitious goals: To restore the independent treasury; lower trade barriers; resolve the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain; and acquire southern California.

Polk accomplished all, but, exhausted, chose not to run for re-election. In his second term, Mr. Bush has only upped the ante considerably, with a domestic proposal that in some respects is more far-reaching than any he has ever proposed."It seems like the riskiest of presidential politics that I can imagine or remember," says the presidential historian Robert Dallek."It may speak volumes about the fact that he wants to be a transitional president who does big things. But if you take big risks, you can fail in big ways."...

There is, of course, yet another possibility: that Mr. Bush understands perfectly the risks to his own party, but nevertheless believes that fundamentally changing Social Security is in the country's best interest.

Here, too, there is precedent. Johnson used every ounce of his political skill and legislative know-how to ram the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress over the opposition of most Southern Democrats, convinced that America would become a better place for it. At the signing ceremony, Johnson is said to have remarked that he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come. His words proved prophetic.

"Bush is not only defying the tides of history, but he's also defying the advice of his own side and doing what he thinks is right," says Lou Cannon, a journalist and author of several books about Reagan."There's something perversely admirable about it."