Matt Yglesias

The Mandate

My colleagues and bosses will, of course, have more official things to say on this subject in the morning, but for now look at the issues tab from the Ohio exit polls, that I’ll take as a stand-in for the as-yet-unavailable national numbers:

People want Obama to implement his agenda, and his agenda is a progressive one — cutting carbon emissions, expanding access to health insurance and early childhood education, making the tax code more progressive, and spreading the wealth around building broad-based prosperity.

39 Responses to “The Mandate”

1. Asher Says:
   November 4th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

   No. What I take from that, the only thing you can really take from it, is that people were mad about the bad economy, and decided to vote Democratic because the man in the White House is a Republican.

2. 55 Says:
   November 4th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

   McCain’s concession speech is pure class. Thank god this guy didn’t run.

3. steve duncan Says:
   November 4th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

   88% of Republicans lose sleep in a xenophobic haze, fearful of the marauding Godless hordes of brown people surely mere minutes away from storming our shores. 88%. Sad, pathetic lot of people.

4. Mixner Says:
   November 4th, 2008 at 11:32 pm

   People want Obama to implement his agenda, and his agenda is a progressive one

   I know you’re excited and all, but this endless “Obama is too a progressive!” is getting really obsessive. Who are you trying to convince? Yourself?

   I think you should pay more attention to Ezra Klein’s rather more level-headed evaluation:

   Obama’s team may be hardheaded empiricists, but they are also decidedly conventional. Whatever else you want to say about the health plan David Cutler wrote for Obama, it’s not the perfect world proposal you’d come up with from a long, hard look at the data. It’s not even what you’d come up with from David Cutler’s look at the data. It’s just a conventional, mainstream, Democratic health care plan that looks a bit cautious in light of Edwards and Clinton’s proposals, and would’ve looked more solidly ambitious if it had come out in 2004. But it doesn’t bespeak any unique approach on the part of Obama’s team. Rather, it’s verging on generic. And that’s true for a lot of their domestic policy plans, the major exceptions being government reform, tech policy, and energy policy.

5. gordon gekko Says:
   November 4th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

   Only 7% of respondents care most about energy policy! If Obama is as deluded as progressive bloggers in his support for radical and expensive energy reform the sooner Republicans can come back to power. And unlike entitlements which are hard to take away, expensive energy policy appeals mostly to the far left. It shouldn’t be too hard for some republican to convince poor working class swing voters to accept cheaper energy prices (especially when most respondents care most about the economy).

6. Mixner's New Public Transit Overlords Says:
   November 4th, 2008 at 11:52 pm

   Get on the bus, motherfucker

7. Public Transit's Budget Director Says:
   November 5th, 2008 at 12:00 am

   We had to cut that route. No money. Motherfucker Democrat Congress.

8. bdbd Says:
   November 5th, 2008 at 12:01 am

   I’m watching Fox News as Obama takes the stage at Grant Park. Just prior, all the forlorn folks at Fox, from droopy Brit to Juan Williams, put me in mind of the witch in Wizard of Oz saying “I”m melting, I’m melting!” But enough of that, let me listen to the next President.

9. Jimm Says:
   November 5th, 2008 at 12:21 am

   Well, I guess it’s time to go to work…

10. cmholm Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 12:21 am

    Let’s not start blowing each other until we see how the rest of the Senate races shake out. The Obama Administration will come in with a strong enough victory, and the GOP for now sufficiently cowed, that he can grab a few hands from across the aisle.

    But, a solid 60 would be a big help. Firewall my okole, the Democrats deserve as much a chance to save or screw the pooch as the GOP did over the last 6 years (plus 2 for filibusters).

    (BTW, the webmasters and system admins have my sympathy tonight)

11. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 12:29 am

    Obama has two choices - fix the economy or start more wars for the benefit of the military-industrial complex.

    Which one he chooses will decide whether he can do anything for anybody.

    And his foreign policy agenda most decidedly is NOT a “progressive” one - unless you consider George Bush “progressive”.

12. Mixner's New Public Transit Overlords Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 12:33 am

    Get on the bus, you bloated shut-in. We’re banning deodorant just for you, motherfucker.

13. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 12:35 am

    A Mandate to End the War
    Not a mandate for more wars
    http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13720

    Let’s be clear about the nature and meaning of the mandate we’re going to be hearing so much about: President-elect Barack Obama has a clear mandate to end the Iraq war as expeditiously as possible. His campaign was energized by and differentiated from Hillary Clinton’s by his emphasis on correcting that horrific mistake. Hillary equivocated, refused to recant her vote for war, and coyly suggested that we might withdraw only as far as Kurdistan. Obama, on the other hand, pledged to get us out in a year, albeit adding weasel words about “residual” forces guarding our bigger-than-the-Vatican ambassadorial compound. He gained his initial momentum by grabbing on to this issue and holding on for dear life, as the Clintons self-destructed and the economy did, too. Obama arrived at this moment not only on the strength of his pledge to end the present war, but also the implicit promise to refrain from involving us in any further hostilities.

    The defeat of the GOP was easily predicted: I’ve been doing it for years, here, for example, and here. This election was a referendum on John McCain’s brand of enthusiastic interventionism and his volcanically warlike temperament,and it was a stunning repudiation of both. Iraq, Iran, the wilds of the Caucasus – what was distinctive about the McCainiac foreign policy was the wide range of his potential targets. Al-Qaeda often seemed to take second or even third place on his enemies list, with the Iranians and the Russians taking first and second respectively.

    Here was a campaign run by the hardest of the hardcore neocons, and the weight of this bone-crushing defeat will settle heavily on their shoulders. Saddled with the neocons’ war and the central theme of the McCain campaign – “victory” in Iraq and intervention around the world – Republicans all across the nation have been dragged down to defeat: the neocons have proven a heavier albatross than the party can bear. What we may be witnessing is the end of the GOP as an effective political force, at least on a national level.

    We know what the American people voted against: they voted to end not only this war but the grim prospect of perpetual war, the “generational” conflict that served as a cover for the politics of fear and an unprecedented assault on our constitutional rights. They voted to punish the hubris of that top White House official who told journalist Ron Suskind:

    “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

    It’s possible to evade reality, to believe it is self-created, and to persist in this delusion for quite some time. In the end, however, reality has a nasty habit of catching up with us. The day of reckoning for “history’s actors” has arrived, and not a moment too soon. The nation breathes a sigh of relief, as a long-festering carbuncle is sloughed off and falls away.

    The scar it leaves, however, will long remain. Certainly it will disfigure the face of the GOP for decades to come. Ron Paul warned them, and they didn’t listen. Now they are paying for their arrogance, and in spades.

    Paul, the leader of the party’s anti-interventionist wing, predicted that the burden of empire would cause the economy to fail – and, with it, the GOP’s electoral prospects. His reward was to be refused entry to the national convention, where they didn’t even do him the courtesy of counting his votes. The party rejected a million enthusiastic Republican and independent voters, and did their best to shrink rather than grow their pool of voter support. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

    This election will make many of our supporters and contributors very happy. At last, the War Party, which they see as synonymous with the Republican Party, has been driven out of the White House, and peace is about to break out all over. A word to the wise: don’t bet on it. The War Party, as I’ve explained often and at length, is hardly limited to the GOP. Its Democratic proxies are influential and often have a decisive influence; witness the legions of Democrats who voted “aye” on the Iraq war resolution.

    As I pointed out yesterday, the War Party has already launched its campaign to capture the Obama administration – and, given his pledge to escalate the Afghan war, they haven’t got far to go. Now is the time when the antiwar movement must rely on its own institutions and exert maximum leverage. We must put pressure on the administration to keep its promise to get us out of Iraq – and guard against a possible confrontation with Iran.

    Joe Biden predicted Obama would soon be “tested” in the foreign policy realm, and when the time comes, one has to wonder: will he take the opportunity to prove his “toughness” and overreact, or will he fulfill the promise of his campaign – the promise of a meaningful change in our foreign policy of relentless aggression?

    Obama has promised to talk to our alleged enemies, but one has to question whether this will merely amount to an elaborate series of ultimatums delivered to Tehran’s doorstep or left at the gates of the Kremlin. If so, these extended “negotiations” are likely to culminate in conflict, giving us more of a pretext to lure our European “partners” into going along with the program.

    From the perspective of the antiwar activist, there are many dangers that lurk just around the corner, and the most insidious and least obvious is the consolidation of economic power in the state. This centralization will make it easier for the federal government to mobilize all the resources of the country for military purposes: indeed, the economic crisis will give the government cover to further consolidate and rationalize its growing power and increase its ability to punish “anti-government” critics. From what we have seen so far, the Obama administration is almost certain to abuse its power in this way.

    Another danger that looms large on the horizon of Obama World is the prospect of a lovesick media corps, one so enamored of their Messiah-in-the-White-House that, while failing to examine his policies overseas, they swallow his explanations too readily. It is all too easy to imagine our besotted press corps capitulating to a new era of political correctness in Washington, where all criticism of the Dear Leader is deemed “reactionary” and implicitly racist. When the Obama administration assures us Iran is building “weapons of mass destruction,” how many in the mainstream media will be inclined to question them? I’m very much afraid of the answer to that question.

    The Obama campaign was supposedly born as a grassroots movement, an online phenomenon that went viral and created a new majority. This myth is belied, of course, by the huge amount of corporate dollars that went into the campaign. McCain was outspent by an incredible margin. The Money Power is heavily invested in Obama, and they fully expect their generosity to be repaid – with interest.

    In the international arena, this means the protection of corporate interests abroad, with the U.S. military being used as a private police force to protect American business interests – you know, the sort of enterprises that are “too big to fail” and have to be succored by the U.S. Treasury. Obama, like McCain, signed onto the Wall Street bailout, and he’ll be just as willing to send in the Marines to secure their interests abroad.

    The more years I accumulate observing American policymakers in action, the more I’m struck by the essential continuity of U.S. foreign policy. Since the end of World War II, our course has been set: straight for the same mausoleum that houses the remains of the British, the Soviet, the Roman, and all other would-be global empires of the past. It will take more than mere “change” to turn this around. It will take a Herculean effort, one that is now possible – but only if we remain vigilant, and relentless in our exertions.
    ~ Justin Raimondo

14. Public Transit's Budget Director Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 12:37 am

    There is no bus, motherfucker. You wouldn’t give us the funding. We’re cutting even more routes tomorrow.

15. Mixner's New Public Transit Overlords Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 1:01 am

    Just because your eyes are clamped shut doesn’t mean the bus isn’t there, motherfucker. Put down the Cheetos and get on the fucking bus.

16. Public Transit's Budget Director Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 1:10 am

    I’m telling you, motherfucker, there’s no fucking bus. We lost a ton of money when AIG went down the tubes and you Democrat congressfuckers wouldn’t give us any fucking more.

17. Mixner's New Public Transit Overlords Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 2:59 am

    The bus just run you down, then backed up over your 350lb frame. Get on the bus, motherfucker.

18. Public Transit's Budget Director Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 3:05 am

    The bus never arrived, because you wouldn’t pay for it, you shit-faced motherfucking moron.

19. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 3:32 am

    The above five posts pretty clearly show what the next four years are going to be like.

20. Mixner's Public Transit Overlords Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 4:11 am

    See that big bus-shaped thing, motherfucker? Put your glasses on, motherfucker, because you’re short-sighted from all that masturbation.

    It’s a bus. Get on it.

21. opportunity knocks Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 4:19 am

    Reagan won because of stagflation and yet acted like the country agreed with everything he said.

22. Adrock Says:
    November 5th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    Obama won. I don’t care why people voted for him. He gets to enact whatever agenda he sees fit.

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