WASHINGTON -- Within hours of Barack Obama's historic election last week, a chorus of media analysts were predicting that the Democrats had at last built a permanent majority that would keep them in power for many elections to come.
The Washington Post crowed on its front page that the "Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate," suggesting that a permanent majority "may be underway."
But a day after Democrats reclaimed the White House and tightened their grip on Congress, a key Democratic strategist was suggesting otherwise.
Bill Galston, who was chief domestic adviser to President Clinton and a policy architect, says, "Democrats do not have a mandate" to usher in a reign of bigger government because there isn't a majority for it.
This was no time to "emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson," he warned in a memo titled "After The Obama Win," in which he cautioned his party to scale down its spending ambitions to a set of more moderate priorities "that can be met before voters rethink (the election) in 2010."
"That Democrats now command a unified government for the first time since the catastrophic midterm defeat of 1994 should flash strong warning signs to party leaders," said Galston, now a government scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution. Translation: If you make the same mistake of overreaching, Democrats will pay the price in the midterm election two years from now.
Meantime, a veteran elections-trend analyst cautions those who think Tuesday's results mean that Democrats have begun a long reign of power to think again. "Obama was the beneficiary of an unusually good political climate that favored him and the Democrats, but it's not going to stay pro-Democrat forever," Rhodes Cook told me after Tuesday's vote.
"We can't see we are in a new liberal era until that has been confirmed in a few more elections. If Democrats think that is the case now, they do so at their peril," Cook said. In other words, the news media's obituaries for the Republicans are a bit premature. Think back to the 1964 election, when LBJ crushed Barry Goldwater and the Republicans in a landslide. Just about every analyst said that the GOP was finished for at least a generation. Four years later, Republicans took back the White House and were making gains in Congress.
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