Did the Democrats get a mandate?

[kentuck]

I saw an earlier post where the Democrats outpolled the Republicans in last Tuesday's election by several percentage points. Since George W Bush claimed a mandate with 500,000 less votes than Al Gore in the year 2000, how can the Democrats not calim an equal advantage this time around?

Do the Democrats need to talk about their "mandate" more? Would that not make it easier for them to pass legislation and make it more difficult for Bush and the Repubs to oppose them?

[valerief]

1. The only mandate George Bush got was Jeff Gannon. nt

[candice]

2. Haggard called in regularly....

[candice]

4. Shrub thought he had a mandate when the Supremes didn't allow the votes

in Florida to be counted. Had everyone who intended to vote for Al Gore been able to do so, we wouldn't be in the abyss we are in now. There's a lot of blood on the hands of those who shoved the loser into the role of President. Shrub himself has always gotten special entitlement by vitue of birth, and assumes he deserves it.

When Blackwell secured Ohio for him in 2004 and New Mexico and Nevada elections were compromised, Idiot Son thought he had a real "mandate."

[Robbien]

3. The DC Dems are too busy trying to get the Dem voters to shut up

and go away. Reid/Schumer/Emanuel are out there grabing credit for the win and telling the netroots/blogs/etc. to be quiet because as leaders they are dragging the party back to the middle.

[muntrv]

5. More so than shrub did in 2000.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. I read somewhere here on DU that the total popular vote for the Senate

Was something like 56/44.

In a country reputed to be 50/50, I call that a mandate.

[Lexingtonian]

7. erm...yes

This is the other side to having run on a vague platform- there can be no sense of a strong endorsement of any particular policy idea, yet.

The game that has to be played goes something like this: first, do all the stuff that is obvious, easy, and popular. Minimum wage increase, renegotiated Medicare drug prices, a lobbyist ethics bill, investigate for cartel behavior in the oil/gasoline market, better civilian security. There's also a bunch of stuff various Republicans wanted to get through that were for the good, but their leadership prevented from getting a floor vote.

So, part 1 is about doing easy stuff and doing it right, doing it right away, and doing it for significantly Republican constituencies too- so people across 80% of the political spectrum are impressed that there is relevance, a genuine desire for some good governance, and some reality of it going on.

Part 2 is about oversight and responsibility. I don't think anyone cares for Democrats mongering how bad the management dimension of the Bush Administration is- what people want is for Democrats to get to the bottom of it, size up the damage, expose it to the public eye, and get to fixing things.

Together, these two things should (a) improve popular support and (b) diminish popular opposition. There will also be a growing public sense of the larger scale solutions. As these kick in, a sense of mandate for certain things will form.

So, I think in our present situation a mandate has to be 'earned'. Not that it will be especially hard to do, but we do have populace that has gotten used to low quality governance and has a hardened disappointment about its experience. This will take a while to break down.

Part 3 is stuff that gets done with a 'mandate'- the hard choices that go against comfort. These are things like forcing a showdown with Cheney about his doings and papers, withdrawal from central Iraq when the Maliki government fails, and giving Al Qaeda suspects fair civil trials and Iraqis compensation for the torture and other abuses during the past several years. There are the voting and elections laws. And a hundred others.

I believe we will have a Presidency to deal with whose support goes under 30% and is dying as its major implemented policies fail. I think Democrats shouldn't set out to knock off Bush and Cheney directly. I don't think Democrats can either finish off or save them- the dying off of their last support bloc(s) is key to that, and is essentially an internal matterbetween Republicans. There will perhaps be one big partisan showdown, in which Cheney tries to fight the full exposure of his affairs to Congress (and The People) under a claim of executive privilege or a claim of national security interests.

Ergo, I think the game is pretty situational rather than following an abstraction-based agenda/list. Voters have given Democrats a lot of leeway, and in return voters expect that all their sensible interests will be engaged and acted upon.

I think that, in the end, you are really talking about Iraq. I believe the public attitude is one of skepticism toward the Bush policies, but also that one more major, decisive, event needs to happen before it will condone either withdrawal or intensification. My impression is that this event is the maturation/success or the collapse of the Maliki government and the constitution it is nominally build on. A kind of Divine Judgment.

[Ringo84]

8. For change, maybe

But I'm still not sure that this was a triumph over conservatism, as others have said. No, I think that this was a triumph over the right-wingers and the way in which our country has been headed for the past six-plus years.

So maybe Democrats do have a mandate in that the American people expect us to clean things up. If we fail to do that, I don't think the American people will hesitate to kick our butts out of office tout suite (sp?).
Ringo

[calimary]

9. I'd say it's something of a "you bet your sweet ass they did" situation.

What the public wanted was CHANGE. They saw us as an agent of that change. Evidently, enough voters thought the status quo, keeping the republi-CONS dominant AGAIN was just a bit more than they could take.

I would say up-ending the House AND the Senate and removing - what? Some THIRTY-FIVE incumbents from both houses - might be reasonably considered a mandate - to go in a different direction than the same old jerks were guaranteed to keep taking us.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

10. It is a mandate for change but not for specific policy since there was no

specific policy universally adopted by Democratic candidates (such as, say, immediate withdrawal from Iraq). If there HAD been specific policy(s) that were widely promoted by most of the candidates, then those policy positions could also be said to have a mandate.