[clue-talk] it's over!

[David L. Willson]

> The cycle would be Republican moving towards control of congress in 2010, Obama being re-elected in 2012. I somehow doubt that the Republican party is going to be able to do ANYTHING in 2010, though. This was a thorough trouncing, a complete rejection of the Republican party on almost all levels of government. It's going to take a long time for the Republican party to recover.

I was going to say this in response to David Wilson:

> This is a clear mandate for the Dems.

But now both of you who have said basically the same thing, so...

Am I looking at the wrong news sources?  As far as I can tell:

Obama got 52% of the popular vote while  McCain got 46% of the popular
vote. In 2004 Bush got 51% to Kerry's 48%.  We didn't call Bush's win
in 2004 a mandate. Are 3 percentage points really that big of a
difference?

Certainly the popular news media is calling this a mandate, but that's
no surprise.  From a critical perspective: is this a mandate?  And
which numbers make it clearly so?

Greg
--

Hey Greg,

First, my name's "Willson", not "Wilson".

What makes this a mandate is the electoral votes and the rest of the Democrat victories.  They pretty much swept the boards.  They flipped states from red to blue.  They effectively played all the Republican's weaknesses (Bush's low approval, the long war in Iraq, and arguably, the recession) in their favor.  They terrified people into voting away the truth about unborn humans.  The only things the libs lost were some fights about applying the "marriage" title and privileges to, and giving adoption rights to, non-traditional and/or non-productive pluralities of sexually interactive adults.

I've congratulated two friends on their commanding victory.  I'm sorry to say that both of them offered negative comments about the opposition in the second sentence.  I'll continue to congratulate the winning team, and hope for a more Obama-worthy response somewhere along the way.  I'm beginning to think people really are this dumb, shallow, oppositional, and propagandized ... even my friends, maybe even me.  I'll have to try to grow out of it, because I don't want to look to my friends the way they look to me right now.  I hope the Bush team can leave gracefully.  I remember something about vandalism by the Clinton team when they left.  Not good.

Hope in one hand.  Change in the other.  Is perception reality?  Let's hope that Hope is reasonable, not blind, and that Change is positive, not loose.

--David Willson