After the Midterm Ordeal: Presidential Psychological Reactions to Election Results.

The public responses of Presidents Bush and Clinton to the 1990 and 1994 midterm elections receive scrutiny here. We employ the construct of "operational code" from the foreign policy literature in assessing presidential responses during three six month periods in the election season. Among our major findings, we discovered that both presidents expressed more cooperative statements in response to their midterm reversals, a rational adaptation to their depleted political resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]