I wrote a post on this subject before the election, and I tweeted on it yesterday after I saw Joe Klein declare, incredulously, that Republicans had misread their mandate from the last election.
This sort of analysis happens all the time in American politics: a new president gets elected or a new party gets control of Congress; the new president or party in Congress pursues a policy mix that goes further than what voters want; and the pundits say, "The new president/new party in Congress misread his/their mandate."
Wrong.
An individual who's sophisticated enough about politics to get elected president, and a party that's sophisticated enough about politics to wrest majority control of Congress from the other party, are sophisticated enough to correctly interpret election results and understand public opinion.
What they do, therefore, is to interpret them, and then ignore them...or pay only selective attention to them.
Why? Two reasons. First, if you care enough about politics/government to run for president or help set policy for your party in Congress, generally speaking, you're going to have some specific, passionately held beliefs about policy. Second, most people who do get elected to the presidency or who serve in a policy leadership role in Congress have beliefs about policy that are further to the right or further to the left than the American public as a whole. (Paul Ryan is a movement conservative, to the right of most Americans. Barack Obama is a big city progressive, to the left of most Americans.)
When it comes time to govern, therefore, politicians have a choice: "We can go only as far as the American public wants us to go, or we can go further." And they usually go further...not because they mistakenly think that's where the public wants them to go, but because that's where the politicians themselves want to go, the public be damned.
This is exactly what happened during the first couple of years of the Gingrich Congress; it's exactly what happened during the first couple of years of the Obama administration; and it's very likely what's going on in the House right now.
Footnote: Of course, there's also a belief among politicians--more in evidence among liberals than conservatives, I think, but that may just be my bias--that once they adopt their mandate-exceeding agenda, the public will come around. That's what they said, for example, about Obamacare when it passed: "People may not like it now, but once they learn more about it and see it in action, they'll get on board."
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