What to do after a repudiation election (LAT)

[spindrifter]

TUESDAY'S MIDTERM election victories for the Democrats in the House and the Senate were striking but not historically extraordinary. Of the 16 midterm elections since World War II, Tuesday's was the seventh that could be classified as a repudiation election, a turnover that revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the policies of the president and his party.

The varied aftermaths of past repudiation elections show the difficulty of forecasting what will follow the Democrats' victory.

After the 1946 election turned his party out of the majority, President Truman worked with the Republican Congress on big measures, such as the Marshall Plan, and won the 1948 election. The Eisenhower administration, by contrast, limped to its conclusion after the 1958 election handed Capitol Hill to the Democrats, and that Democratic congressional victory paved the way for John F. Kennedy's election in 1960.

Subsequent presidents responded to repudiations by working with the opposition Congress; others failed to do so, with unfortunate results for their administrations. Lyndon Johnson signed no major legislation after the Republican takeover in the election of 1966, and Gerald Ford was unable to salvage his presidency after the post-Watergate victory for the Democrats in 1974. Ronald Reagan, however, recovered from his 1986 loss of the Senate and weathered the Iran-Contra scandal; his vice president, George H. W. Bush, won the presidency in 1988.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-summers11nov11,0,4488774.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail