What is a Mandate?

Q: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?

NOVAK: Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. … So the people who say there’s not a mandate want the president, now that he’s won, to say, Oh, we’re going to accept the liberalism that the — that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday. [11/06/04]

Source.

Others:

As of now, Obama’s popular vote margin stands at 7,401,289 — more than twice Bush’s 2004 vote margin — and Obama has netted 63 more electoral votes than Bush in 2004. In his column, Novak dismissed the Democratic Senate gains this year, even though they have netted five seats for a total of 56, with three more seats potentially up for grabs. By contrast, the conservatives’ so-called 2004 “mandate” netted only four new seats for a total of 55.

If you say that Obama does not have a mandate, can you give a definition of a mandate that would still allow for the 2004 election being a mandate? And if 2004 wasn’t a mandate, would that lend credence to the theory that the Media isn’t biased to the Left, just incompetent in general.

And if you say Barrack does have a mandate, does that mean he should move us more Left than he suggested during the campaign, or is he beholden, (as I believe) to move us only as far as he promised during the election.

I argue that Barack does have a mandate. That mandate is far larger than the one George Bush had (if he had one) in 2004. I also argue that his mandate is strictly limited to moving the country only so far as he verbalized during his debates. He didn’t campaign as a crazy left-wing nut, if he moves in that direction he not only loses his mandate, he loses our trust in him.

~ by centristextremist on November 7, 2008.