Ambition and Division: Legacies of the George W. Bush Presidency

3. Legitimacy, Leadership, and Longing for Realignment: The Party Basis of the Bush Presidency

40 LEGitim฀cy, LE฀DErshiP, ฀nD LonGinG For rE฀LiGnmEnt the Party basis of the bush Presidency john j. coleman and kevin s. price 3 W hat started rocky, ended rocky. Elected under controversial circumstances , George W. Bush entered office with a legitimacy crisis on his hands. A significant proportion of the American public viewed Bush as a dubious president, in part because he was outpolled in popular votes by the losing candidate and in part because his road to the White House took several legal detours through the Florida courts and finally through a contentious Supreme Court decision. His legitimacy crisis may have ebbed when 9/11 recast his presidency, but it did not disappear . About 65 to 70 percent of Democrats questioned the legitimacy of Bush’s election throughout his first term, according to CBS News/Gallup polls. The broader leadership question encased in the legitimacy problem remained: how can this president lead? Most observers thought his second-place popular vote finish made any claim to a mandate irrelevant. Accordingly, when Bush entered office, many expected the new president to have tremendous difficulty enacting his legislative agenda and leading the government. The American party system, however, provides opportunities for pres- 41 legitiMacy, leadership, and longing for realignMent idents to establish legitimacy and exert leadership. Presidents seek to establish identities and political strengths independent of their party, but they remain dependent on party members to achieve many of their goals. Presidential leadership is connected to the party system in two important ways. First, the historical trajectory of the party system may be more or less favorable for the establishment of presidential leadership. That is, some presidents are simply in a more difficult position historically because of the strength or weakness of current party alignments. Second, presidents whose own victories were very narrow may face additional leadership challenges when their party’s majority is also paper thin, but this situation can also create opportunities. President Bush was in a strong position regarding the first point, the historical trajectory of the party system. Simply put, the basic dynamics of the party system—realignment, economic conditions, and decreasing ownership of issues by the Democratic Party—provided a relatively favorable environment for Bush’s leadership claims. On the second point, Bush faced a challenge of legitimacy and leadership similar to that faced by many other presidents we classify as “plurality presidents”—those who receive less than half the popular vote and nonetheless win the presidency because of severe splits in the other party’s coalition, reflected in the other major party’s candidate losing significant vote share to third-party candidates —but Bush’s situation was sufficiently different in that he had a distinctive set of advantages relative to other plurality leaders. Therefore, despite some similarities of their election victories, Bush started his term in a stronger position. The ingredients were in place for Bush to establish both legitimacy and leadership, even without the intervening events of 9/11. For a long while, the president appeared to capitalize on this promise. Over his first six years, his support score in Congress—the percentage of times Congress voted in accordance with the president’s position—was 81 percent. For eighteen months of those six years, Democrats controlled the Senate. As a measure, the support score has its weaknesses. For example , the votes in question might not reflect the president’s agenda per se. And items on that presidential agenda that never made it to a congressional vote, such as the president’s plans to reform Social Security, are not factored into the score. Still, the measure provides a rough sense that Congress was casting votes consistent with the president’s wishes, to a degree that might be considered surprising in light of the circumstances surrounding the president’s victory in 2000. The president felt compelled 42 john j. coleMan and kevin s. price to uncap his veto pen only once in those first six years, a historically low record. Despite this success, the president’s fortunes began drifting downward in his first term. Within twenty-four months, all of the approval bounce of 9/11 had been depleted. The conflict in Iraq, along with growing economic uncertainty, ate away at the president’s approval and became a large share of political dialogue and rhetoric in Washington. Room for the president’s other hoped-for signature accomplishments, including reform of immigration and Social...