Of Mandates and Mendacity

Republican officials seem to talk a lot about mandates. If it isn't the "individual mandate" in the 2010 health-care reform bill, which they assert is a fundamental threat to our freedom, it's the mandate they consistently claim to have been given by the American people. The theory of an "individual mandate" being a threat to our freedoms is easily dispatched by a look at the provisions of the 1792 Militia Act (May 8th portion), which contained a requirement for free citizens to purchase weapons and was signed into law by George Washington. If an individual mandate was acceptable to no less a champion of freedom as one of our founding fathers, it should be good enough for all Americans.

Thankfully, the Republicans' equally dubious assertion that they received a mandate from the electorate, as opposed to winning some close elections as the result of a protest vote, can be similarly dismissed with a look at the facts. When you review the voting results for Republican candidates versus Republicans in the past few elections, there's a case to be made that, if either party has been given a mandate the past few years, it's been the Democrats.

In the 2006 mid-term elections, nearly 78-million votes were cast between Democratic and Republican House candidates (i.e. the only national offices where every seat was on the ballot). Out of that total, Republican numbers were a bit shy of 35.7M, while votes for Democratic candidates came in around 42M. That works out to 45.9% for the GOP and 54.1% for the Democrats. Since this was a higher percentage for Democrats than the Republican candidates got in the 2004 elections, after which President Bush spoke of the (you guessed it) mandate he'd been given, you'd think the GOP would acknowledge the passing of the mandate torch. If they did, I missed it.

If 51.4% was enough to give both president and party an electoral mandate in 2004, surely the 55.6% the Democratic candidates got in 2008 would do the trick. As it happens, despite getting over 65M votes (compared to a little over 52M for the Republicans), no one on the GOP seemed inclined to concede the mandate for the victors which they should have had after the 2006 elections. To be fair, though, the GOP was busy obstructing the duly elected government from actually governing, while tacitly approving of scurrilous accusations about the legitimacy of our (American-born) President.

Which brings us to last year's mid-term elections, famously described by our rightfully-elected President as a "shellacking" and infamously described by a number of Republicans as a mandate. Among the high-profile officials using this term is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who talked about said mandate on the January 2, 2011 edition of Meet The Press. While I can't speak to the quality of Graham's education, it seems to be a little lacking on the math side, because the Senator is claiming a mandate with just 53.6% of the total votes cast for Democratic and Republican candidates (about 45M out of 84M). If 55.6% in an election with considerably higher voter turnout doesn't yield a mandate, then it's hard to see the logic behind Graham's current claim. Of course, this is politics and if there's one thing politics teaches us it's that, while logic should count for more, it doesn't win elections.