While I am sure James Tartanto and his usually capable staff at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web would like to forget President Bill Clinton, that does not excuse statements such as this:

It has been 40 years since the Democrats won a resounding victory in a race for the White House. That was in 1964, when the GOP nominee, Sen. Barry Goldwater, was seen as an extreme right-winger.

While it has been 40 years since a Democrat won over 90% of the electoral vote, Bill Clinton's victory over Bob Dole was quite decisive. Clinton won 70.4% of the electoral votes and a slight majority of the popular vote in the 1996 election. So it has only been 8 years since the Democrats won a resounding victory in the race for the White House, while it has been 16 years since the Republicans last did so.

C'mon Taranto - give credit where credit is due. Love him or hate him, Clinton was the most charismatic Democratic politician since JFK.

Update: James Taranto responded.

It is you who made a facutal [sic] error. Clinton had a popular-vote plurality of 49.24% in 1996, not a majority and hardly a resounding victory.

I appreciate the quick response, but I there are two points that I would like clarified. One, where are you getting your data about the 49.24%? I don't trust everything I see on the internet, but I found these 1996 presidential election numbers at several sites. These numbers give Clinton a majority vote of 50.06%. Perhaps your numbers include all the fringe candidates? I did not find a reference that included them; however, I can see where they might lower Clinton's popular vote by a percentage point.

More pertinent to my initial point, winning 70% of the electoral college is a resounding victory. As you and your team have correctly pointed out many times, albeit in the context of Bush vs. Gore, the electoral votes are the only votes that matter. This double-standard is unworthy of the high quality that I have grown to expect from reading your column.

Final Update: James Taranto promptly and politely responded again. The fringe candidates did indeed reduce Clinton's share of the popular vote by almost a percentage.

The Infoplease figures are incomplete. According to "Presidential Elections 1789-2000" (CQ Press), Ralph Nader received 684,902 votes (0.7%), and other candidates got 905,807 (0.9%).

Here is an online source for pesidential [sic] election data that I've always found reliable: http://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/frametextj.html

Anyway, I certainly wouldn't call a victory "resounding" with less than 50% of the popular vote and fewer than 400 electoral votes. Resounding victories are FDR's (all four of them), LBJ's in '64, Nixon's in '72 and Reagan's in '84. Maybe Reagan's in '80 and Bush's in '88 too...

My compliments to Taranto for the online reference, it is very useful and I am sure I will use it in future posts. However, this does not change my main point. Winning over 70% of the electoral votes is a resounding victory no matter how you choose to look at it. Perhaps the root of our disagreement is not the use of the word resounding, but of victory. From our emails, I have the impression that Taranto is using victory as a proxy for mandate. Look at the impact of changing this one word in the disputed sentence:

It has been 40 years since the Democrats won a resounding mandate in a race for the White House.

Now that is a statement that is much clearer and one in which I would agree. Victories are decided by electoral votes. Mandates are decided by the people.

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