On NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, the host, Scott Simon, was discussing the upcoming battle over the domestic budget with Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Bill Beech, senior fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation.
Simon asked Beech, "Was the vote the President received, and for that matter the increase in seats the Republican Party got, due to their domestic proposals?"
"I'm not one who says the President can't claim a mandate on these issues," Beech replied, "Because I don't think mandates are ever certified until the Congress convenes and you see how successful the President's agenda is in moving from committee to a floor vote. And if it's successful, then he obviously has a mandate."
Come again? In the US, all words are subjected to the gale-force winds of marketing and misuse, and since the election the term "mandate" has taken a beating. If the President has a mandate on the basis of a 2-3% victory, then the word means nothing.
Forget that Simon didn't use the word "mandate," which raises questions about its unsolicited use in Beech's reply (Karl, is that you?). Beech deserves credit for skipping the popular vote altogether. According to his logic—and I'm being charitable here—a narrow electoral victory, which he retroactively terms a "mandate," is "certified" (or not) by the not-so-simple act of moving legislation from the committee to a floor vote. Never mind the vote itself, just moving the legislation certifies it.
Even if he meant that the legislation's passage certifies the mandate, it makes no difference: There was nothing to "certify" in the first place. The mere movement of legislation from committee (or stomach) to floor vote (or colon), let alone its movement beyond the legislative body onto the Capitol steps in solid form, says more about the ability and will of various Congressional factions to compromise or, as has been more popular since Bush took office, of the dominant faction to force a bill through, than it does about any popular support for the legislation itself.
This is a curious view. At bottom, it implies that the chaos of desires and rationales which politicians like to call "the will of the people" is perfectly expressed through the equally chaotic legislative process. This implies that there is no mediation between the collective vote for President and the legislation that he signs into law. How absurd. If anything, "the will of the people" is often FUBAR by the very same process. Mandate? Nigga, please. A mandate begins and ends with the popular vote. No certification required. And in this case, there is no mandate. Continually saying there is doesn't make it so.
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