House of Eratosthenes

After every election, the divided and the not-so-divided, there’s always some kind of tempest in a teapot about who has a mandate, and what it is. We don’t have “contemplation” about it and we don’t have “musing” about it, because those terms would imply uncertainty, and there never is any. There is only conflict. But everybody’s mind is completely made up about it, and always the same way.

President Obama says His mandate is to raise taxes.

Also, if anybody had plans about preventing the coming economic apocalypse by hiding the President’s pen from Him, I guess that’s out. Darn.

But The American People want taxes to go up for the people who actually provide the jobs we say we all want. Hmmmm…well, about that. It is true that here and there, as Obama ran for a second term He said a lot of stuff about making the rich pay their fair share. He’s said a whole lot of stuff. Now if we’re looking for an honest and reliable interpretation of a mandate, without having our perceptions of it colored by anybody’s preconceived or biased agenda of what they want done on any given day…the thing we need to do is answer a question as objectively as possible, taking into account that the American electorate has the capacity to come together on only a tiny number of issues compared to the dozens and dozens we actually discuss. Question: What are the two or three objectives with which President Obama most closely identified Himself, during those times in the campaign in which He was most worried about winning votes from the mainstream?

Because I think everyone would agree — winning votes from the base is not a mandate. The base wants the same things it always wants, that’s why it’s a base. So this would not be helpful in any given year, in figuring out what the mandate is going to be.

What did Obama do to acquire, and retain, fidelity from the independents, centrists, the all-important “swing voters.” Answer that, and you have your mandate. Well, huh. It seems first & foremost, President Obama has a mandate to make sure women are not compressed into a physically compact and uniform size and then stored in ring binders. I agree that this would be important, although I’m not sure I’ve heard of it actually being done anywhere. Some women are pretty big and would require more compression than others…but I’m going to take it as a given that, for the time being at least, that job’s done. After that objective has been met, He should make sure Big Bird isn’t going away. I’m really not sure about raising taxes to pay down the deficit, or raising taxes to do anything to keep the government’s financial house in order. I would say He, in the White House, has a mandate to keep putting the hurt on those terrible awful rich people, and once such efforts reach the House of Representatives, they have a mandate to kill them off before they go any further. Since the entire House is up for re-election every two years ya know, and if The American People wanted Obama to do whatever He wanted without any tests or obstructions in place, I have to think they would’ve made sure that happened, and that’s not what they did.

There was a power shift in the Senate, of two seats, toward the democrats. Only a third of the Senate is up for re-election at any given time, so it’s hard to effect a shift of two seats there. That might mean something. But on inspection, we see this has to do with the “Hey, I think I’ll say something stupid about rape and abortion” thing, so I think the “mandate” might be that senators who are facing election should not say dumb things. That, and perhaps overly-sensitive humorless women have a likelihood for destroying the country by voting in senators who do not have the country’s interests at heart?

Scott Brown was defeated in Massachusetts, so mandate: Fabricating your Cherokee Indian heritage is perfectly fine. What, was there some other issue? Was ObamaCare being discussed as feverishly and as frequently as it was when, y’know, Brown was elected in the first place?

I do see a mandate for more women who are obnoxious and unpleasant, whom sane men do not want to see naked. But that is only by way of inductive reasoning, by analyzing a pattern and figuring out what it might mean (although the pattern is unmistakable). As far as what was specifically stated, I’m seeing a massive cacophony of stupid stuff, especially with regard to the President Himself. People don’t like “Romnesia,” and/or they don’t want women to be kept in binders, and/or Sesame Street. Also, having the Vice President behave like the drunk uncle you’re sorry you invited over for Thanksgiving, is a huge plus. That’s the President’s mandate.

In other words, there is a penalty to be paid for using cheap gimmicks to sway low-information voters. If that really is how you pull off a re-election, and you want to prance around afterward talking up how clever You are for figuring out that this is what America’s voters really want to see, and your advisors are all geniuses for helping You pull off this victory in the wake of a devastating midterm defeat; then these fibrous, hairy strands of lint trap detritus become your “mandate” because when push came to shove, that’s really what dragged You across the finish line isn’t it? And isn’t that how we define it? Isn’t that the only test that really matters?

You know, President Obama really has me thinking here: How often was His name mentioned in those House races? How often was ObamaCare mentioned in those House races? Not an infrequent occurrence, I’ll bet. Something to be pondered as we busy ourselves with figuring out the “mandate” from the election. It’s too late to do anything about ObamaCare, but we still have a President named Obama who seems to define “compromise” as “finding out what I want and then doing it.” So that part of it, at least, is relevant: Republican House members ran for re-election saying “keep me in, in case Obama is re-elected” — and they won their seats. Perhaps as those races are inspected on a case-by-case basis, some data will emerge that will create problems for that. But I doubt it.

The Mandate is to punish wealth-creators. Every analysis mentions “Romney is this super-rich guy” as a deciding factor in the election. He actually — omigod!!! — made money in the free market. Which requires talent, skill, and drive, and the ability / willingness to take the long view. Obviously this must be punished.

And that’s what The Mandate is, at bottom — we’re determined to stick our heads in the sand for four more years, reality be damned. I’ve seen a few elections in my lifetime, and never have they seemed so superficial as this. In any normal year, even in Massachusetts, a moron socialist like Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t have made it out of the primaries. We wouldn’t even have had to discuss the Fauxcahontas thing, because it never would’ve come up (of course whacko leftwing pseudo-radicals lie about their “racial heritage;” that whole Ward Churchill thing comes to mind). But even if it somehow got that far, a candidate flat out lying about what she claims to be a central part of her identity — and getting busted by no less a leftie organ than the Boston Globe on it — would be an electoral death warrant.

But it wasn’t. She won handily.

Lather, rinse, repeat, all across the nation. Romney/Ryan asked the American populace to look at things like adults for a change; the people declined.

And yes, I’m aware that the left said the public “had a temper tantrum” in 2000. Rebuttal: nobody ran on the looming fiscal cliff back then. As hard as it is to imagine, George W. Bush wanted to be “the education president” back at the turn of the century, while Al Gore ran as Clinton 2.0. This year, Romney/Ryan made the impending financial apocalypse the centerpiece of their campaign. Nobody cared.

As a nation, we voted for Make-Believe. That’s the mandate.

God help us.
- Severian | 11/10/2012 @ 13:39
[…] House of Eratosthenes discusses mandate wars […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 11/11/2012 @ 07:40
President Obama says His mandate is to raise taxes.

I have a mandate to tell Barry to blow me.
- Physics Geek | 11/11/2012 @ 22:45

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The Mandate WarsSaturday, November 10th, 2012

The Mandate Wars
Saturday, November 10th, 2012