HE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL campaign was not edifying, but it educated millions of Americans about math, geography, and the Constitution. Americans can also learn a lesson from history. Close elections are healthy and have been good for the country. Landslides, which encourage hubris and folly, have not.
Mandates are what leaders make of them. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won 40 percent of the vote in a four-way race. He faced what he called in his inaugural address ''great and peculiar difficulty'' and he did not mean pills for old folks. Lincoln took action and saved the Union.
In 1872, after Ulysses S. Grant won reelection and 29 states, his friends stole millions in railroads, taxes, and whiskey, making Grant's era remembered for graft and greed. In 1920, Warren G. Harding won with 60 percent of the vote, but his most memorable legacy is the Teapot Dome scandal.
Franklin D. Roosevelt reached his zenith of power in 1936, winning all but two states. He then tried to pack the Supreme Court, leading to a loss of 77 Democrats in Congress and weakening his New Deal until World War II intervened. Inertia, carelessness, and human frailty afflict post-landslide presidencies. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower said of his chief-of-staff, ''I need him.'' But Sherman Adams resigned after he admitted taking gifts, including a vicuna coat, from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston businessman.
Lyndon B. Johnson was a legislative magician, but after he won 61 percent of the vote in the 1964 election, overweening pride lured LBJ into the swamps of Vietnam. His successor, Richard Nixon, illustrates the difference between a close call and a landslide. After he won narrowly in 1968, Nixon continued the war in Vietnam but opened relations with China. His domestic policy was centrist, even liberal on civil rights, affirmative action, and environmental protection. After he won 49 states in 1972, Nixon's dark side - the focus on his enemies, real and imagined, and his conspiracy to cover up the crimes of Watergate - surfaced.
A landslide should rumble with the lessons of history, but each master of the avalanche does not hear or heed. Ronald Reagan won 49 states in 1984, but his ''Morning in America'' soon faded to the darkness of the Iran-Contra conspiracy in his White House. Bill Clinton breezed to reelection in 1996, winning 379 electoral votes, then fell to hubris and horniness.
The Constitution sought what John Adams called ''a balance of power.'' Today's media-obsessed culture often focuses on power, not balance. But history has familiar patterns. Lincoln's victory in 1860 was accompanied by bad calls in the media. In his 1995 biography, ''Lincoln,'' David Herbert Donald listed some premature judgments about the Civil War:
''The Chicago Tribune anticipated success `within two or three months at the furthest,' because `Illinois can whip the South by herself.' The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days, and The New York Tribune assured its readers `that Jeff. Davis & co. will be swinging from the battlements at Washington ... by the 4th of July.'''
The Civil War lasted four years, ending five days before the assassination of a president who did not panic because he trusted the people. ''While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years,'' Lincoln said in his 1861 inaugural address, a more serious time than this. ''We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.''
Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.
