Don't Take Your Guns to Town

A lot of people are complaining about how the President doesn't really have a mandate for enormous change. Pandagon has a chart that presents how much of the country is 100% behind the President (which is 51% of the voters). When you add in the apparent furor about abortion and Gay marriage that probably helped Bush to many of those votes, well, the idea that he has a broad mandate in the traditional sense seems a little laughable.

The problem is that President Bush doesn't need a broad mandate, in the traditional sense, to push through his extremist positions. He thinks what he is doing the right thing. In a sense he has his mandate from God, and frankly what are 55,949,348 Americans compared to God? Particularly when we are clearly both morally and intellectually wrong (as he and his followers believe). So I wouldn't necessarily expect President Bush to moderate his plans in the slightest based on a tight electoral victory.

On the other hands the New York Times also has a story on how President Bush may face certain Congressional roadblocks to doing everything he wants to do.

The president declared that he had "earned capital in the campaign, political capital," which he would spend on an agenda that includes overhauling Social Security and the tax code. Republican leaders seemed determined to carry it out.

But in the convoluted political atmosphere of the Capitol, where every lawmaker must worry about something that no longer concerns the president - re-election - it may not be so easy for the Republicans to steamroller the Democrats.

Anyway no reason to despair just yet, although I can certainly understand a certain amount of weeping and wailing.