The Mandate

You’ve probably noticed that the President’s men have declared the President’s electoral victory a mandate. A clear mandate. A decisive mandate. A moral mandate. A family values mandate. I find it telling that after two years of campaigning on terror, terror, terror, fear, fear, fear, 9/11,9/11,9/11, the bottom line is now a moral-family values mandate—helped along, of course, by running anti-gay rights amendment votes in key red states which pulled the President’s base out to the polls in droves. The neoconservatives feel no need to be subtle about it. They have achieved an important strategic victory. And make no mistake, this was a neoconservative coup served up steaming hot by Karl Rove and the neoconservative elite.

Says neoconservative, William Kristol, in his Weekly Standard column:

The hair-pullers and teeth-gnashers won’t like it, of course, but we’re nevertheless inclined to call this a Mandate. Indeed, in one sense, we think it an even larger and clearer mandate than those won in the landslide reelection campaigns of Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996.

Says neoconservative, William Bennett, in the National Review Online:

Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal ("The Great Relearning,” as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it)—no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected.

That kind of talk should scare your socks off.

Out of a pool of 115,334,671 American voters, 22% of them claimed that family-values were their top priority, according to exit polls that have been touted on the cable news shows (including FOX) as well as ABC, NBC, and CBS. That’s roughly twenty-five million (25,373,627) voters—slightly less than President Bush’s estimated evangelical base. Those numbers, clearly, do not add up to a mandate of American voters, but they give him a mandate among those who voted for him in this election. And that’s good enough for them to call it a mandate. The rest of us may be viewed as an inconsequential focus group.

There is one point that I think most of us in the inconsequential focus group have overlooked. Given that the neoconservatives, with their policy makers and mouth-pieces strategically placed throughout the government and media, threw everything they had at this election and the electorate, they still only managed to pull off a 1% margin of the needed votes for victory. Fifty-one percent of the vote is a very small-margin victory.

And that is why we’ve had a three day media blitz about a mandate. They don’t have one and they know it. When they come up on the short end of reality, media blitzes and propaganda do push public opinion in their favor. Iraq war? Mandate? When the neocon community is scared of something, they blitz. Just watch them. Hillary, anyone? They’re scared of her, but they also know that she’s a useful wedge to keep the Culture War alive and thriving. They need the polarization—a house divided.