The supporters of Barack Obama like to point to his 9.5 million vote margin of victory over John McCain in last year's election as evidence of his mandate for change. But viewed from the perspective of the percentage of the popular vote he won, the rookie will have to do a whole lot better in office than he has to date to move into the "mandate" ranks with Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Eisenhower, and FDR. In the only poll that counts, Obama has no more claim to a mandate than Carter in '76, GW Bush in 2004, nor Reagan in 1980.
1964 Johnson 61.05
1972 Nixon 60.67
1984 Reagan 58.77
1956 Eisenhower 57.37
1952 Eisenhower 55.18
1944 Roosevelt 53.39
1988 GHW Bush 53.37
2008 Obama 52.87
1980 Reagan 50.75
2004 GW Bush 50.73
1976 Carter 50.08
1960 Kennedy 49.72
1948 Truman 49.55
1996 Clinton 49.23
2000 GW Bush 47.87
(Gore) (48.38)
1968 Nixon 43.42
1992 Clinton 43.01
Perhaps more to the point, however, is the fact that John McCain would be president today but for 1,383,540 more votes properly apportioned in the nine formerly red states which went to W in 2004. Mandates don't hang in the balance of so few votes out of over 30 million cast. The cracker thin margins of victory for Obama in those states for 2008 are as follows (rounded to the nearest thousand):
Colorado 215,000
Florida 236,000
Indiana 28,000
Iowa 147,000
Nevada 121,000
New Mexico 126,000
North Carolina 14,000
Ohio 262,000
Virginia 235,000.
These handfuls of people made all the difference for Obama, but he had to outperform his predecessor John Kerry in those states by 3,036,289 votes to get them while his opponent McCain had to underperform his predecessor Bush by 191,852 votes at the same time. Neither eventuality is likely next time. The Republican candidate in 2012 won't have a record of alienating the base as a maverick and won't take four weeks to cash a check, nor another four to allocate it correctly, because she won't be McCain. And the Democrat candidate will not be able to run on a platform of change because we'll all have had plenty enough of that already. And staying the course won't work either because large numbers of chronically unemployed people who've lost their homes won't find that prospect very appealing.
There's a reason sales of firearms and ammunition are up over 30% since Obama got elected. There's a reason the normally undemonstrative and silent majority recently marched on Washington. There's a reason town hall meetings this summer witnessed excessive hyperventilating. And "mandate" isn't one of them.
