What, exactly, did Americans vote for? (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Defining Obama's mandate
Don't let Republicans tell you Barack Obama didn't win a mandate, said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic online. Conservatives insisted President Bush had a clear mandate when he won reelection with a much smaller margin of victory, and Bush certainly acted accordingly. Voters knew Obama planned to "make the tax code more progressive, reform health care, and the like," so Democrats should muster the courage to push that agenda.
Not so fast, said Ralph Reiland in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Obama won precisely 1 percentage point more of the popular vote than Bush did in 2004. The needle didn't budge from voters' "center-right ideological self-identification," so there's no call for "turning America into a European welfare state or beating our swords into plowshares" or pushing our coal plants into bankruptcy.
It's pointless to deny that Americans just voted for change, said actor Robert Redford in The Huffington Post. And part of that change "was to move away from the failed energy philosophy of 'drill, baby, drill' to a more farsighted strategy."
"Voters want change—Obama's campaign message," said Amity Shlaes in the New York Post. "But the Democratic Party is widening the definition of change by the hour." And just as they did under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression, they'll use the financial crisis as justification for resurrecting government health care and other old parts of their social agenda that have nothing to do with the mortgage crisis.
Comment on this article
Recent comments | 9 total
Regardless of the job President Obama does, ie how effective he is, or exactly what he is able to achieve, conservatives must see that they also benefit from this turn of events because it gives us new ground to stand on. After the ugly election has now turned to rubble, let's renew our understanding of why we're conservatives and what we have to offer.
We can quibble over the meaning of mandate forever but the important thing is that the new administration do the smart things to get us out of our multiple messes. Those smart things probably have little to do with idiology and more to do with pragmatism. The endless left v. right squabble gets us nowhere.
The headline got it right. It's Obama's mandate and he was clear about his intentions all along. It is also clear that if some Democrats try to push the changes beyond what Obama has already outline then it will be Obama's obligation to push back. His is not going to be a fun job but I suspect that he knew that going in.
We all knew before hand that BO stood for.......change. What kind of change......>>national health care....educational reform....progressive taxation....increased FICA....increased capital gains....increased spreading of others' wealth....pull out of Iraq regardless....mandatory civilian militia....decreased military....new energy sources....bankrupt the coal industry by placing large fines for any type of potential pollution. These were the essentials that BO promised. How does he plan to do any of these things and to what extent? He provided few or no details except for the plan with respect for bankrupting coal. The dem congress has their own agenda....>waaaaay too extensive to list here. One major point of dem plans is to leave the borders open and legalize millions of illegal aliens so that dems will have a permanent unskilled, uneducated base of about 12-40 million new voters for the dems. This will insure the dems a permanent supremacy of voters and the socialist paradise of their dreams with them as our rulers. It does not matter whether BO or the dems have or don’t have a mandate. With the executive and legislative branches under their control, they are the ones who will set the tune to which we will have to dance. Thank God I am neither a dem nor a repub. Repubs will have no advantage under the dem juggernaut that will begin on January 20th.
Let's face it, Obama bought the election. After having spent $600 million and having the mainstream media overwhelming on his side, he still had 48% of the voters voting againist him. I don't call that much of a mandate. But now that he's our President, I wish him all the luck he will need to keep us safe, after all if we can't stop terroist attacks, all the other campaign promises are moot.
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