One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.
With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.
W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.
The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.
As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.
As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.
Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.
Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.
Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.
