In the current issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik takes an insightful look at last year's presidential race ("Why the Democrats Keep Losing"). As an aside, Muravchik provides a history of the New York Times' view of presidential mandates:

Several of the President’s detractors hastened to suggest that his relatively narrow margin of victory—amounting to 3 percent of the popular vote—should not be taken as a “mandate.” Whether they would have said the same had Bush’s Democratic opponent won by a like amount is doubtful.

The New York Times, for example, has regularly questioned the presence of a mandate in recent elections—but only when the winner has been a Republican. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan bested incumbent President Jimmy Carter by 10 percentage points, the paper’s editors observed that his “mandate,” a word they themselves put in suspicion-arousing quotation marks, had “little policy content,” a position they reiterated four years later when Reagan won reelection over Walter Mondale by a whopping 18 percentage points (a “lonely landslide” and “a personal victory with little precise policy mandate”). Nor could the 8-point victory by Bush’s father over Michael Dukakis “fairly be called a mandate,” asserted the paper in 1988.

Whenever a Democrat has won, by contrast, the Times has perceived things differently. After Bill Clinton’s first victory (by 6 percentage points) in 1992, the editors commented: “The test now will be how quickly President-elect Clinton can convert his mandate into momentum.” When he won reelection (by 8 points) in 1996, it repeated the thought—“There can be no question about his mandate”—and added a little civics lesson: “The American people express their clearest opinion about what they want government to do through their choice of chief executive.”

As we reflect on the just completed political year, it's worth reading the whole thing.

Via Real Clear Politics.