“After Republicans did better than expected in winning the White House, the House and the Senate in 2004, President George W. Bush famously claimed a mandate,” the New York Times reports.
Said Bush: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it.”
“Two years later, after Mr. Bush’s bid to privatize Social Security imploded without ever even coming up in Congress and exhaustion with the Iraq war set in, it was instead the president who was spent. Democrats took back Congress, and the governing trifecta Mr. Bush had trumpeted was gone.”
“The same thing then happened to Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as they gained supremacy in Washington only to see it slip away after two years of aggressively pressing their agenda, with mixed results.”
