The questions for this morning: So what’s a mandate anyway, and does President Bush have one?

The answer to both for this morning and for all of history: It depends.

The president is claiming one, of course. Many presidents do. And by doing so, the president is setting out a strategy for future action more than reflecting a historical fact. Bush had a smaller margin of victory than Bill Clinton in 1992 or Harry Truman in 1948, and the kind of people who insist that the president has a mandate in 2004 were very likely arguing the very opposite when Clinton and Truman were preparing to take their oaths of office.

Here’s a handy three-part way to look at this mandate business: The side that wins almost always claims a mandate. The side that loses almost always denies that the president has one (and sometimes that losing side itself is in denial). The bigger the margin of victory, the less the winning side has to insist it has a mandate. (In politics, power is often in the unspoken truth.)

‘Mandate’ will drive agenda

In a situation like the one that will prevail in 2005, the mandate mantra is one of the tools Team Bush is using to advance its domestic agenda, principally an overhaul of the Social Security system and a new offensive on tax cuts. Bush and his aides would have pushed for these things even if we weren’t seven weeks past an election. By claiming they have a mandate to pass them, they’re merely enlisting a convenient rhetorical reinforcement for the next round of the two longest-running battles on Capitol Hill.

Still, this mandate moment is intriguing and instructive, for it tells us much about our politics as we approach the new year. It tells us that the president feels emboldened by his real majority. It tells us that Bush will not slide into history but instead will battle through the second term, taking on the toughest opponents in American politics (the senior lobby). It tells us, too, that Bush isn’t content to play the role consigned to his father (transition president) but wants to be remembered as having finished the role that Ronald Reagan began (transforming president).

Presidents don’t necessarily need a mandate to do that. Franklin Roosevelt had a mandate, and no one doubts that he was a transforming figure. But Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a mandate, and no one argues that he wasn’t a transforming politician. Then again, the mere possession of a mandate does not ensure success. I think it’s possible to argue that Jimmy Carter had a mandate in 1977 (three-word description: Heal the nation), but no one is arguing that he succeeded; partisanship was even worse when he left office, and trust in government wasn’t exactly at Olympian heights.

This time around, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News have performed a useful service, actually asking the only people in the world who deliver mandates (that would be the voters) whether that is precisely what they did. The answers are not surprising, at least if you’ve read this far.

A limited mandate?

They can be summarized this way: It depends.

It depends, in this case, on what the topic is. Lead the nation in a war against terror? Bush has a mandate, no doubt about it. Three out of four Americans, according to the Journal/NBC Poll taken this month, say they gave the president a mandate to do that. Make the tax cuts permanent? Less clear. A sample representing not quite half the country (48 percent) says it gave the president a mandate to do that, as opposed to 41 percent, which says no mandate was given. How about a constitutional effort to ban gay marriage? Half the country says it wasn’t giving Bush a mandate for that.

Now to the big one, creating Social Security investment accounts. Just over half (51 percent) say they gave no such mandate, as opposed to only 35 percent who say they did. “America has spoken,” the president said after his opponent conceded last month. It did speak, but it didn’t say anything about Social Security.

So, in a country divided red from blue, I’d urge a yellow caution light on the mandate business. Same goes for those times, which seem so long ago, when red and blue were simply primary colors and not the product of a political system that starts out with primaries. Remember Lyndon Johnson’s mandate in 1964? Shirley Anne Warshaw, the Gettysburg College specialist on the presidency, says LBJ’s mandate was simply a resounding “no” to what Barry Goldwater proposed, not an invitation for the expansion of the federal government and the Vietnam conflict.

Now listen to George C. Edwards, the presidential scholar at Texas A&M University: “Presidents usually mouth some words about mandates. It’s hardly ever true, but they talk that way anyway. The term usually floats away.”

Mandates lack specifics

America spoke when it elected Lincoln president, but it didn’t say anything about an Emancipation Proclamation. America spoke when it elected FDR, but it said nothing about a peacetime draft. America spoke when it elected Richard M. Nixon, and it surely said nothing (not even a whisper, and I remember) about normalizing relations with Red China. The country didn’t even speak two years later, and Gerald R. Ford went ahead and pardoned Nixon anyway.

The president, his Republican allies and the big brokerage firms are determined to change Social Security, and the Democrats and the entrenched pooh-bahs of the senior lobby are determined not to let him do it. It will be a political fight bigger than any the nation has had since the 1980s, especially if it gets conflated in a fight about making permanent the Bush tax cuts.

The money will flow, and so will the passion, and so, too, will the rhetoric. The word “mandate” represents only the opening round. In that context, it has an oddly quaint sound, doesn’t it?