Four years and one day ago, after George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by 2 million popular votes and 34 electoral votes, he held a press conference in which he declared :
I feel it is necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move. Something refreshing about coming off an election, even more refreshing since we all got some sleep last night, but there’s — you go out and you make your case, and you tell the people this is what I intend to do. And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let’s work to — and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.
And it’s one of the wonderful — it’s like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the — after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election — and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on
Yesterday, Barack Obama beat John McCain by more than 7 million popular votes and at least 186 electoral votes. That’s a lot of political capital and he earned it the old-fashioned way, by bringing people together :
When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease.
As the New York Times showed, Obama’s victory wasn’t just isolated to big cities on either coast.
Barack Obama ran on a platform of fundamental change to the way our government works and serves its people. As such, his overwhelming victory is a clear mandate for the changes that he advocated : healthcare reform, ending the war in Iraq, and most importantly, an Apollo-like alternative energy project which he described in a recent interview with Joe Klein :
The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office
Unlike 2004, in which George W. Bush misinterpreted his victory as a mandate to privatize social security, Barack Obama has been very open about his intentions for this entire campaign. Yes, Obama has promised to work across the aisle (a promise I think he intends to keep, btw), but he did so while running on a platform that was, if John McCain and his Republican allies are to be believed, “liberal” and “socialist”.
As John McCain was quick to point out in their final debate, Obama wasn’t running against George W. Bush, he was running against John McCain, a straight-talking Republican “maverick”. If John McCain is the centrist reformer that he claimed to be, then the contrast between McCain and Obama is even more stark. Given their consummate differences, shouldn’t the fact that voters chose Barack Obama mean something?
Now that he has won the presidency in a landslide, Barack Obama is under no obligation to govern like a centrist or temper his policy goals to accommodate a point-of-view that the American people have decisively rejected. Obama won. Elections have consequences.