The Washington Post discovers that the narrowest presidential reelection since Woodrow Wilson was not, in fact, a mandate:

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Instead, some political analysts say it is just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon — the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad. In Bush’s case, this includes restructuring Social Security and the tax code and installing a group of judges he was unable to seat in his first term. This was the error that nearly sank Bill Clinton’s presidency in his first years in office in 1993 and 1994 when he put forth a broad health care plan, and that caused then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republican “Revolution” to stall in 1995 in a confrontation over cutting spending for popular domestic programs.

Indeed — it’s a classic misreading of public opinion of the sort predicted in Politicians Don’t Pander. The increasingly ideological folks in our political class win an election, think they can manipulate public opinion, and try to go too far in implementing their ideological goals. Then the public pulls back, and we swing in the other direction. Christopher Wlezien describes something similar called the “thermostat effect” in preferences for spending — when it goes up, the public’s preferences for more spending go down (just as you turn the temperature down on the thermostat when it gets too hot).

The problem is that President Bush hasn’t realized that the public isn’t with him — the lesson he’s learned from his father and his first term is that bull-headed stubbornness wins political fights. So he’s staking his second term on Social Security. But unlike tax cuts, private accounts are not popular, and he doesn’t realize that he (like all presidents) generally can’t move the numbers on domestic policy initiatives (see Politicians Don’t Pander and On Deaf Ears). In addition, his approval ratings are under 50%, the public hates his handling of Social Security, and is slowly turning against the war in Iraq — more than 50% of the public now thinks it wasn’t worth fighting.

Bush may not be part of the “reality-based community,” but reality will catch up with him soon enough.

(Related: See my previous posts on mandate claims.)