Before the first vote is counted, plenty of bad advice for Barack Obama is arriving in a wave of clichéd punditry that, should he actually win, will only grow from now through Inauguration Day and beyond. The potential magnitude of Obama’s expected victory – and the accompanying upsurge of Democrats in both houses of Congress – is already creating a sense of panic that he and his fellow Democrats might actually try to enact the program that their party supposedly upholds.
In the Wall Street Journal, center-right Democrat Doug Schoen, former polling partner of Mark Penn, cautions Obama and the Democratic leadership in Washington against interpreting victory, even a “landslide of historic proportions,” as a mandate for progressive policies. Such a landslide would be, he acknowledges somewhat grudgingly, a massive repudiation of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. But having just dislodged the wingers from power with a blast of electoral scorn, Schoen argues, what voters will really want the Democrats to do is seek “consensus” with those same rejected figures and their discredited ideology.
Expect more of the same from all the usual suspects (and although he will certainly not be alone, I certainly do mean David Broder, who attributes McCain’s impending defeat to poor management skills and touts the “post-partisan politics” for which we all supposedly yearn).
I wish these founts of conventional wisdom would listen to Obama’s closing argument. I wish they had paid close attention to McCain’s ranting attacks during the final weeks, too. If Obama and the Democrats win an overwhelming victory across borders of red and blue, then they will assuredly possess a mandate for the policies that the president-elect has described with great specificity in every speech since the Denver convention. Yes, they’ll have a mandate for the traditions of fairness that represent their political legacy, too—the same traditions that were so loudly and angrily mocked as “socialism” by McCain and his pit bull.
Should the Democrats return to Washington in glory, the majority of voters will expect them to uphold their commitments—and not sell out in the name of post-partisanship or any other gauzy fantasy.
