How presidents' win after midterm defeat

Washington Post:

The president was in a funk. Morose from midterm elections that handed Congress to the opposition, he stewed in private, vented to friends, turned on aides and summoned self-help gurus to help him understand just what went wrong. He was left to argue with reporters that he was still "relevant."

It took Bill Clinton months to get his feet planted again after the 1994 defeat. But he did recover and went on to win reelection two years later. So too did Ronald Reagan bounce back from the 1986 midterm elections, which cost his party the Senate. As President Bush struggles to recover from a similar thrashing, his advisers are studying the Clinton and Reagan models for lessons to revive his presidency.

Historical comparisons are always fraught with peril, since each president faces his own distinct challenges and brings unique faculties and flaws to the task. But veterans of past administrations see patterns that offer hope even to badly weakened presidents such as Bush. Adversaries who assume that Bush has been permanently crippled by the Democratic takeover of Congress, they say, misunderstand the opportunities still available to him.

Both Reagan and Clinton found that the power of the bully pulpit still gave them an advantage over a Congress controlled by the other party. Both Reagan and Clinton used a mix of cooperation and confrontation, moving to the middle on selected issues to pass legislation while standing firm on others that touched on core principles. Both pounced when the other side overreached.

Whether Bush could emulate those examples is an open question. He points to his time as Texas governor, when he worked with Democratic legislators....

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... Bush may wait for the right moment to take on Democrats. He has issued only one veto in six years in office but would be eager to veto Democratic spending bills. "The question is if they want to test him on the veto," said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy. "If I were them, I wouldn't. If they're trying to present themselves as the party of fiscal discipline," it would be a mistake to let a spending bill be vetoed.

Another senior official said Reagan and Clinton showed that carefully choosing battles is a fruitful strategy after a midterm defeat. "The broad lesson is that presidents can come back from setbacks," he said. "There are some things you control and some things you can't control, and you have to try to take advantage of both."

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There is more. Liberals while they lead the Democrats, are still a minority in both houses of Congress. Conservative Democrats have the swing votes on most major issues and Bush needs to find a way to push issues that he is in agreement with the Blue Dogs on. Spending is one area where he can muster a majority. In foreign policy he is still largely in control. The liberal side of the Democrat party has an agenda, but they still do not control to the extent they can impose their will on the more pragmatic members of the party who stick their fingers into the wind to see which way the politics is blowing. It is the latter group that voted for the war and has since turned against it for political convenience. But, they still fear being labeled the cowards that they are.