I suppose it's inevitable that you'll get this never-ending question about whether Republicans received a "mandate" from the voters on Tuesday.
I've always considered it kind of a dumb question, partly because the political class characteristically uses the word in a way that makes no sense. They talk about a "mandate" as if it's license to do whatever you want, when the word actually means you have to do what you're told.
But there I go parsing words like someone who thinks they have meaning. I guess I shouldn't be writing about politics if I'm going to think like that. What Reince Priebus is telling Gwen Iffil here is that the voters clearly didn't elect a Republican majority in the hope that it would work in cooperation with Obama and his agenda. Quite the contrary, the voters' desire is for the Republicans to stop Obama's agenda. And according to Priebus, that's exactly what they're going to do:
Three reasons you can be sure the voters don't want the GOP enabling Obama:
- Obama himself said his policies were on the ballot. And yes they were. The verdict came in. Thumbs down, bro.
- This was not some "anti-incumbent" election as liberal pundits may try to claim, because across the country, Republican incumbents were re-elected, including conservative governors in the blue states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Florida. The only incumbents who went down were Democrats.
- Voters do understand that when you elect Republicans in massive numbers, they're going to go to Washington and oppose the Democrat president's agenda. If that wasn't what they'd wanted, they would have voted differently.
I do think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner should make a good-faith effort to work with Obama in passing good ideas, before just out-and-out getting into public battles with him. And if Obama is receptive, then fine, let it work. What I hope they don't do is - in the event Obama rejects the outreach, which I would expect - bend over backwards to again and again to be accommodating of him, in a fruitless attempt to earn brownie points from the media.
That is never going to happen. Their
mandate instructions from the voters is to put the brakes on Obama's agenda, permanently, and pursue one that's in the country's best interests. If Obama insists on being the obstacle to that, let him deal with the consequences of that decision. The Republican Congress has to go to Washington and serve the country, not the president.
