When the Republicans unexpectedly won the House in 1994, exit polls showed that voters were motivated by a House banking scandal, antagonism to Bill Clinton's health plan and a desire for change after 40 years of Democratic control.
But Republican leaders headed by Rep. Newt Gingrich saw the results as endorsing the party's conservative agenda, especially items in the Contract With America they had laid out with great fanfare.
Within a year, it became clear that the GOP had overreached.
Mr. Clinton resisted Republican proposals to make major cuts in some federal programs, creating a standoff in which many government agencies were forced to shut down temporarily.
Polls showed Republicans were blamed. Mr. Clinton won re-election, and the GOP nearly lost the House, saved by a late-breaking Democratic fund-raising scandal.
Now, George W. Bush is in the White House.
And like Mr. Gingrich in 1994, he interpreted the result as a victory for his campaign agenda, even though he got fewer popular votes than Al Gore and needed a favorable Supreme Court ruling to get the required 270 electoral votes.
It is a reasonable claim on issues like education reform and an across-the-board tax cut, which Mr. Bush stressed in his campaign. But the picture is muddier when one gets away from those issues.
For example, according to national network exit polls, while Mr. Bush had strong support from conservatives and Al Gore had the backing of most liberals, the vote of self-styled moderates was fairly close. Mr. Bush won 44 percent of them.
That is exemplified by his showing among particular groups.
He received the votes of 34 percent of union members, 36 percent of those who said the environment was more important than economic growth, 25 percent of those who said abortion always should be legal and 38 percent of those who said it mostly should be legal.
In so doing, he regained some of the "Clinton Republicans," swing voters who abandoned the GOP in 1992 and 1996 but saw him as more moderate than other Republicans.
However, Mr. Bush's policies as president on issues of special interest to those groups seem closer to the views of his hard-core conservative backers.
He had been in office only two days when he reinstated the "Mexico City" policy that denies governmental aid to international groups that include abortion in their family planning programs.
He also has taken several actions that seem designed to show organized labor what he thinks of its fervent backing for Mr. Gore. For starters, his initial choice for labor secretary, Linda Chavez, was anathema to top labor leaders, though his second choice, Elaine Chao, has better relations with them.
And he has further antagonized the unions with executive orders removing union preferences in federal contracts, support for a GOP congressional move to repeal ergonomics guidelines issued by the Clinton administration, a vow to block all strikes against airlines and a demand that campaign finance reform limit union contributions.
Until last week, Mr. Bush's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, former New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman, was touting policies that pleased environmentalists. But the White House abruptly ended that by reversing a campaign position and disclosing it won't seek new curbs on carbon-dioxide emissions.
Most of those actions reflect stances Mr. Bush previously had indicated but not stressed. But they also are the acts of a president who believes he must continually satisfy his conservative base, even in areas where other backers had hoped for something different.
The question is whether, at some point, voters will conclude that Mr. Bush, like Mr. Gingrich, is overreaching his mandate and whether that will hurt him politically, especially without a strong economy to bolster him.
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