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By EUGENE J. MCCARTHY
Hie weeks immediately following a {residential election, that ia, every four yean, mandate hunting season arrives. Sometimes the hunting of the mandate, and the finding of it, is easy, as expert observers noted after the victory of Richard Nixon in 1972. He was given a mandate, it waa said, by the voters, but it escaped in the disorder of Watergate.
Following the election of Jimmy Carter, by a narrow majority in 1976 experts questioned whether or not he had a mandate. There was some affirmative speculation that he did have one, but that it was not in evidence, but waa possibly being kept on the third floor of the White House, or by Rosalyn or even Amy on the second floor.
However, last summer, the former Vice President Walter Mondate, who as a candidate argued that he deserved the Democratic nomination in part because he knew his way around the White House, said that one of President Carter’s problems was that he never did have a mandate in the White House. As quoted in 7Yme Mr. Mondale said, “Let me tell you, being in the White House without a mandate is pure hell.”
Earlier in the Carter Administration, Marquis Childs, a long time sura observer, had announced that President Carter no longer had an “aura” of leadership. President Carter was also trying to carry mi—according to some observers—without a consensus, and as the former vice president said at the same time, that he revealed the absence of the mandate in the White House; President Carter didn’t even have an “agenda" to lean on.
President Carter, one must say in retrospect, did very well considering that he had no consensus, no aura, no agenda, and especially, no mandate.
The early commentators on President Reagan’s landslide victory this year said that he had won, or had been given, a mandate. Not ao, according to the New York Timet of Sunday, November 11. A new method of determining whether a newly elected president has a mandate, or does not have one, has been introduced: It is more objective, more quantitative, possibly mote democratic than those need in the past
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