ON DEADLINE: Change mandate carries political risk

President-elect Obama's mandate for change carries with it political risks. Let the newly empowered Democrats try to go too far, too fast, and they likely will be punished. It's happened before to political leaders who haven't heeded the lesson.

Obama may have. As he rejoiced in victory, he said the Democrats will act "with a measure of humility" and an effort to heal partisan divides. "Government can't solve every problem," he said.

With strengthened command in Congress - at least 55 seats in the Senate and House control by a margin of about 80 votes - Democrats will be tempted to come on strong next year. Their activist liberals likely will demand it. In the campaign, Republicans depicted Obama as a far-out liberal, the next thing to a socialist. Yet his could become a voice of restraint in the new era of Democratic power.

"There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president," he said.

Late in the campaign, Republicans argued that voters should not risk putting Democrats in full charge of the government. Now that it has happened, House Republican leader John Boehner, seeking to hold his post despite the GOP election setbacks, said the Democrats "want us to surrender" and give them a free pass to enact their legislation. "It ain't gonna happen," he said.

Republicans do not have the votes to back that claim in the House, but they can slow or stop Democratic legislation in the Senate with filibusters, real or threatened.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, cast as liberal villains in Republican campaign attack ads, said the election was not a mandate based on party or ideology but on the American desire for change. They will be central players in deciding how much change. Pelosi spoke cautiously about the next steps. "The country must be governed from the middle," she said. "You have to bring people together to reach consensus."

But consensus pledges are a bit like New Year's resolutions - meant when they are made, but not always heeded when they are tested in action.

It adds up to a situation Obama will need to handle with care.

One president who went too far was Lyndon B. Johnson, who won with a 61 percent landslide in 1964 and carried with him an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, with 68 seats in the Senate and a 36-seat gain in the House. Johnson used that power to win his Great Society domestic program but planted the seeds of his own repudiation by escalating the American role in the Vietnam War at the same time.

The Democratic heyday in the House ended with the 1966 elections. They lost 48 House seats. Two years later, shaken and challenged, even within his own party, over war policy, Johnson quit the presidential campaign.

Ronald Reagan remodeled the government with his landslide election in 1980, his coattails delivering Republicans control of the Senate and hefty gains in the House. Two years later, with the economy slipping despite the big tax cuts Reagan won in Congress, the Democrats won most of their lost seats back. The Democrats retook control of the Senate in 1986.

President Clinton came to power in 1992, but the new administration suffered over ill-advised Cabinet choices, and in a controversy over gays in the military. It got worse when he tried to win an overhaul of the health care system designed by Hillary Rodham Clinton. The first lady's proposal never came to a vote in the Democratic Congress. Senate leaders not only lacked the votes to pass it, they questioned its terms themselves. That overreach was the Democrats' undoing in the congressional elections of 1994. Republicans gained 54 House seats and won control for the first time in 40 years. They regained the Senate, too.

And Clinton wound up arguing that he, too, was relevant to the system. Chastened, Clinton sounded a bit like Reagan in his 1996 State of the Union address when he declared, "The era of big government is over."

By then, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, leader and chief beneficiary of the Republican sweep, was falling prey to the same peril, overplaying his hand. Republicans balked at passing appropriations to keep the government in funds, Clinton took the dare and let things shut down temporarily, and put the blame on them.

Then, in 1998, the Republicans engineered preliminary impeachment steps against Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Those turned out to be steps too far. Gingrich forecast sizable GOP gains in those elections, historically the weak point for a second-term president. Instead, the Republicans lost five seats.

Already restive, House Republicans turned rebellious. Gingrich resigned as speaker and quit his House seat.

Another mandate won and then lost. Another lesson for the now dominant Democrats.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Walter R. Mears has reported on politics and government for The Associated Press for more than 45 years.