Posted on 11/04/2004 9:16:19 AM PST by mrustow
What's a "mandate", anyway, and does a 3% margin of victory in the popular vote, a 5% margin in the Senate, and about a 4% margin in the House qualify as one?
>
Democrat dead-enders?
The Dems are starting to remind me of the
Baathist party in Iraq
Chrissy also asked someone last night, 'how do you get someone to vote against their best interests?'
It's like Christmas :-)
...and continue to amaze observers by making themselves even more irrelevant.
And yet, Katie Couric refused to recognize his victory. And Democrats like to call other people angry and mean-spirited?!
Seems to me that what's mean-spirited is to tell a bald-faced lie about what someone else said. Katie Couric said that Bush had won a majority. That's not refusing to recognize his victory, that's confirming it. What she denied was that his victory was overwhelming, or whatever constitutes a mandate.
I can remember Presidents like Johnson, who won with about 60% or more of the popular vote (my memory is not exact), and Nixon, who won every state except Massachusetts. Those guys got mandates. President Bush got a 3% victory, and has majorities of 5% in one house and about 3% in the other. Those are majorities, but they're not what I'd call a mandate.
Surely it works well as a DNC talking point, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
LIBERAL DEFINITION OF POLARIZATION - Republicans (MAJORITY PARTY) who DO not Support Democrap (MINORITY PARTY) agenda are POLARIZING
If the situation is reversed as it was for 40 years, its called DEMOCRACY.
Let's try one:
OLD WAY: I agree with George W. Bush on tax cuts.
NEW WAY: I agree with George W. Bush, the most popular president in American history, on tax cuts.
OLD WAY: I agree with George W. Bush on winning the War On Terror.
NEW WAY: I agree with George W. Bush, the most popular president in American history, on winning the War On Terror.
59.1 Million people can't be wrong.
No American President, with the exception of our beloved George W. Bush, has achieved that level of popularity at the ballot box.
Well, to hell with this "mandate" crap. George Bush won the election, clearly and decisively. Republicans have significant majorities in both the House and Senate. They have a job to do. It is clear that the majority of voters in the country want them to get on with it. The 'Rats can either get on board and help in a constructive way, move off to the side and sulk, or stand in the road and to be run over and left as a grease spot. It's their choice.
BTTT
It probably has been 5 years since I watched ABC, NBC or CBS, but, like you, I was interested to see how they were handling this ass-kicking.
The thing that astounded me was how, though the same faces were there (Brokaw, Rather, Jennings), they all looked and sounded like dodering old dinosaurs.
I was astounded with how ancient and feeble they all looked and sounded.
A mandate is a command. Comes from some latin word that I forget now.
If I say, "I want to do such and such," and you say, "OK, here's the authority, go do it," that's a mandate.
So if GWB says, "I want to hunt down and kill terrorists, reform social security, and cut taxes," then says, "You all know where I stand and how I'll do things," and then we say, "OK, here is the authority, go do it," that is a mandate.
In the sense used in politics, a mandate occurs if the candidate wins AND has won on the basis that he told the voters he wants to office in order to do something.
The size of the victory is irrelevant.
Tony told him, "You know better than that you are a man of faith with children, you know that is not so."
Last night on Hardball, Matthews and Gregory were acting as if Bush's victory was a loss since he failed to unite the nation. Instead of any introspection on how the Democrats failed so miserably, even with their huge get-out-the vote drives, they attacked Bush for not taking New York and California, as FDR and Reagan did.
The media, just like the Democrats, are in complete denial about why they continue to lose power. And while it may give them comfort to mischaracterize the tightness of this presidential election, they continue to ignore just how much power and influence the Democrat Party has lost over the last decade, plus. This is a party that still controlled much of the South through the 1980s...yet has since been reduced to what can truly be described as only token representation in a few states.
The fact that the Democrat Party can't see this trend that has now been occuring for over a couple decades is an indication that they are incapable of governing themselves...let alone this country. As long as they continue to blame others for their failures, they will remain a minority party lost in the wilderness.
Katie, Chris Matthews, Susan Estrich, Michael Moore, Maureen Dowd, and Don Rather and the other media leftist writers are all idiots. They are also very miserable most of the time. I always wonder what is in their "closets". An abortion here or there? broken marriages? They probably got the s**t kicked out of them while they were at some Catholic school someplace and have now grown up to hate God, the church, religion, --you know--typical normal people. So they do not have a clue as to what makes the average true patriot and hard working american tick. They are clueless. And they will be forever clueless because they think they are God(s). Yesterday was trully a remarkable day in America. I wished I could have been able to hang out at each of the above individuals homes and watched them skirm and cry. We won. They lost. They are lost. God, I love this country!
What fools in Hollyweird! bump!
Sam Houston State College - SHSC?
Dan sounds like he went to Sam Houston Institute of Technology.
Excellent post. Amazing, isn't it? Dan Rather still thinks Bush can't win Ohio 'til Blather announces it. This level of denial is psychotic.
Late in the evening I clicked over to CNN. I was shocked. There was no ticker on the screen, like on FOX, so you could see results coming in no matter what the talking heads were focusing on at the moment. The studio graphics looked old and washed out and hard to understand. They had not yet called Ohio an hour after FOX had called it. The discussion moved at a snail's pace and facts I knew from earlier in the evening were not yet in the assumption base.
It was like entering a time warp to the election coverage of 1969.
Some would quickly respond that I just need flashy graphics and the like, that the difference is one of style over substance. No, on the contrary, if you would click between FOX and, say, CBS during election coverage the biggest difference is literally A COMPARATIVE DEARTH OF INFORMATION on the Old Media. The dinosaur anchors will never let go of the power of deciding what information you simple viewers can handle. Till they die or are led off on walkers.
"Thus, do Rather and his CBS colleagues feel constrained to play to their base." Yes. They and the rest of the "SMSM" are all sounding LaRouche-Like as they continue their descent toward the cess-poll of Tabloid Journalism.
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