David Kolb: A mandate means the president gets to lead

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on November 12, 2012 at 8:16 AM, updated November 12, 2012 at 8:19 AM

Those concerned about Republicans shedding their delusions after the election shellacking delivered by President Barack Obama and the Democrats needn’t worry.

Party true believers from the top down are already insisting that this election proved nothing, that the president wasn’t given a mandate by the voters and that GOP obstructionism from their last bastion in the U.S. House of Representatives should continue because that’s what America really wants.

Boehner.JPGHouse Speaker John Boehner of Ohio gestures as he speaks to reporters during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 9, 2012. Boehner said any deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff should include lower tax rates, eliminating special interest loopholes and revising the tax code.

So stated, in essence, Speaker of the House John Boehner on the day after the president’s re-election. Boehner, lest we forget, represents a district in a state (Ohio) where Republicans got clobbered, where GOP election operative and fundraiser Karl Rove was humiliated on national television, and from a state that delivered the election to Obama.

Boehner: “The American people this week didn't give us a mandate to do the ‘simple’ thing. They elected us to lead. They gave us a mandate to work together to do the best thing for our country. We know what the best thing would be.”

And what would that be, Mr. Speaker?

Well, I’ll boil it down for everyone outside the GOP bubble and tea party echo chamber: No new taxes on the rich, and cutting benefits for poor and middle-class Americans.

Yes, it’s the exact mantra that Republicans have been chanting throughout their disastrous campaign season.

Note that the substance of the “mandate” that Boehner believes was delivered by voters pointedly, somehow, includes a “mandate” for continued House Republican obstruction.

This denial of a voter mandate for Democratic and liberal values is being echoed up and down the line today by Republicans everywhere, including those responding to’s very own post-election question, “What will pull our country together?”

This was typical: “Do you realize that Obama only won by the slightest of margins? I think it might be a little too much a of generalization to imply that ALL the people want Obama. It's more accurate to say that a little more than half the people want him. The rest, which is A LOT of people, want someone else.”

Yes, we’ll be hearing a lot about “razor-thin” margins, the “slimmest of victories,” etc., but reality, as usual for Republicans, appears to escape them.

You see, the president won his re-election bid. By Friday, his popular vote total stood well over 61 million, representing about 50.4 percent of the electorate casting ballots -- a total and percentage that will only grow in the days ahead as the numbers are finalized from the Democratic-leaning far western states. Obama also won 332 electoral votes counting newly blue Florida, more than any Republican since 1988. By contrast, Romney will finish with an electoral percentage at barely 48 percent, perhaps even less, and a skimpy 206 electoral votes. That means the Republicans lost.

In an election year that saw 23 vulnerable U.S. Senate seats held by Democrats up for grabs, the Democrats actually picked up two seats, retained one seat held by a like-minded Independent, and won a seat (in Maine) by an Independent likely to caucus with Democrats. That means Republicans lost.

Among the Senate winners was Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. She is the first openly lesbian member of the U.S. Senate, which represents a defeat for the party that specializes in demonizing gay people. Also winning was Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, who campaigned largely on kicking the rich off their zero-taxation welfare subsidies, and on the issue of holding Wall Street’s masters of the universe, the big banksters and the nation’s billionaires fiscally accountable. The victories of new senators like Baldwin and Warren means the Republicans lost.

In U.S. House of Representatives contests, according to the Associated Press’ compilation, the Democrats have already gained seven new seats from the last Congress, and may well pick up additional ones once the truth sinks in among those holdouts on the right that their efforts have been for nil. To date, in terms of the popular vote, Democratic House candidates have garnered 54,705,707 votes, or 48.81 percent, while GOP candidates have won 54,202,746 votes, or 48.37 percent. To sum up: Republicans lost seats, and lost the popular vote for Congress. I guess that means Republicans lost.

So all this malarkey from Republicans about the lack of a mandate for President Obama and Democrats is crazy talk.

Does the GOP think America has forgotten the 2000 election, wherein one George W. Bush actually lost the popular vote, was handed the Electoral College victory by his pals on the U.S. Supreme Court, and then governed as if he and his party had won the most lopsided victory in history, giving us two deadly wars off the books, unpaid-for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, a budget-busting prescription freebie for Medicare seniors, and deregulation that caused the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression?

No, Speaker Boehner, you will not dictate to Democrats in this Congress or to this president.

And to prove the point, I hope more than anything that the president and his party let those Bush tax cuts expire at midnight on Dec. 31, and then challenge Speaker Boehner and the Republicans to adopt the first bill of the new session, which would be to restore those tax cuts -- strictly to middle-class Americans.

Yes, that will do for starters, along with immigration reform to end the nightmare for Latino families, and above all filibuster reform in the U.S. Senate to deny Republicans their scurrilous parliamentary tactics wielded solely with the intent to hurt this country and this president.

Elections, it has been said, have consequences.

That means, this time, for Republicans.
