Many people on this site and others that I have visited over the past 24 hours have been claiming that President-elect Obama's big win on Tuesday is a mandate for the entire liberal agenda to be pushed in Washington. They have also been attacking people like Senator Reid for saying that this election was not a mandate for political ideology and like DNC Chairman Dean for saying that this election was not a mandate to have a New Deal.
Everyone is arguing over the answer to this question - What is the mandate that the country handed President-elect Obama? Before we begin to act in Washington, we must determine as accurately as we can what exactly is the answer to this question. It is very important to get the answer correct - because if we get it wrong and go too far the moderates and independents will vote the Democrats out in 2010 and 2012. That is what Chairman Dean and Senator Reid were getting at in their explanations about a mandate.
I believe that it is pretty clear in this case what was mandated in this election . . . follow me below the fold and I'll explain.
The question as I see it is whether the mandate is a mandate to carry out the entire liberal agenda (basically a complete rejection of conservatism as many, many bloggers seem to believe)? Or, was it a mandate for the House and Senate to work together with the President to pass legislation addressing the specific issues that President-elect Obama spoke about in his campaign?
I believe that the answer is the latter - the country was mandating that the Legislature work with the Executive branch to address the specific issues that President-elect Obama raised in his campaign listed below ranked by importance to the electorate:
- Re-regulate the financial sector so that the banks cannot take such big risks and hurt the economy by running up a bubble. (Corollary to this is to make sure that the banks don't use the money from the rescue package to line the pockets of CEOs and to throw lavish parties and weekend getaways.)
- Increase taxes on the wealthy and on capital gains.
- Create good well-paying jobs.
- Make health care as affordable as possible and make it available to the widest number of people possible.
- Remove troops from Iraq and support the Vets when they come home.
- Fix crumbling infrastructure.
- Encourage the creation of alternative energy sources - creating jobs in the "green sector."
- Reinstate Habeus Corpus, do away with spying on the general populace, uphold the Constitution.
- Require equal pay for same job regardless of gender.
- Reduce the number of abortions by making sure contraception is available.
I believe that what the mandate shows is that people want our politicians to listen to them - to find the problems that we all agree are the most pressing and then find solutions to the problems. The problems listed above are problems that President-elect Obama identified in his campaign and in the exit polls the voters said they liked his ideas for fixing them better than McCains ideas for doing so.
To say that the public is mandating that we address some of the more extreme ideological problems (that weren't covered in the campaign) is not accurate. The more extreme liberal issues were not raised during the campaign (if they had been President-elect Obama would not have won at all as the majority of people in this country don't like "extreme" positions on either end of the spectrum (left or right)).
In the end, Senator Reid and Chairman Dean are following President-elect Obama's lead. We must find the common ground and work to come up with the solutions that the majority of the electorate can live with. The majority of the electorate overwhelmingly supported Obama's proposals for fixing the economy and for getting out of Iraq. That is what was mandated - NOT THE ENTIRE LIBERAL AGENDA - as Senator Reid and Chairman Dean pointed out!
Remember the center is called the center because they dislike extremist on either side. They sided with the Democrats this year because they liked our proposals for fixing the economy and Iraq - to assume that they agree with all of our agenda is incorrect and to try to impose a more "left" agenda on them would be to destroy the coalition that President-elect Obama worked very hard to put together.
So, let's roll up our sleeves and help our new government enact and carry out the new economic and foreign policies that we mandated!