Obama Victory Comes With No Mandate

[WestVirginiaRebel]

National Journal:

Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public.

If the president begins his second term under any delusion that voters rubber-stamped his agenda on Tuesday night, he is doomed to fail.

Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching. Obama is capable—as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him.

“The mandate is a myth,” said John Altman, associate professor of political science at York College of Pennsylvania. “But even if there was such a thing as a mandate, this clearly isn’t an election that would produce one.”

He pointed to Obama’s small margin of victory and the fact that U.S. voters are divided deeply by race, gender, spirituality, and party affiliation. You can’t claim to be carrying out the will of the people when the populous has little shared will.

Andrew Jackson was the first president to claim that the desires of the public overrode Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. Virtually every president since Jackson has claimed the mantle, even while lacking two ingredients of an electoral mandate: a landslide victory and a specific agenda. More often than not, Congress trims the president’s sails, leaving both the leader and his followers disappointed.

“Presidential claims to a mandate, such as President [George] W. Bush in 2004, are misleading to the public and the officeholder,” said Anthony Brunello, professor of political science at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla.

________

 

A lame duck second term?

[Rokke]

I can't believe Ron Fournier wrote this. He's normally just another MSM propagandist.

[Draggingtree]

Mandate my ass

 

Doug Ross:

In other words, convincing 1/10th of one percent of the American population to vote for fiscal rectitude would have changed the course of history.

Mandate my ass.

http://floppingaces.net/most_wanted/mandate-my-ass/

[Rokke]

Obama will never accept this. He and the democrats will govern like they took 80% of the vote. Like the Wellstone funeral, it will burn them. The best thing we can do is push through the media battleworks, that OBAMA OWNS THIS. All of it. And what happens in the next couple years is his work, and his alone.