Politics, two things

Everyone knows President Bush won re-election yesterday. It was a small pleasure to not have the fighting we had last time around. Today I set the television to CNN and left it on for most of the day. After watching for hours last night (I went to bed at 4:30) and then today, I finally had enough and turned it all off.

Right now, I have two issues. The first is the constant use of the word mandate. While by definition,

2 : an authorization to act given to a representative <accepted the mandate of the people>

President Bush receives a mandate by winning the election, pundits and talking heads use the word in different context. When listening to commentary and news programs, it comes across as "responsibility to act on stated plans due to overwhelming support by voters." I do not understand how 51.4% of the vote is overwhelming support. Rather, it's a very close vote according to the percentages. Isn't any election decided by less than 10 or 20 percentage points, certainly less than 3 percentage points, an indication the populous is seriously divided?

The second issue is the potential good Democrats may get to suffer through, and how they are going to blow it. I (and others) previously stated it might be a good idea for the Republicans to win. The hope behind this thought is the Dems may realize the current platform and message do not adquately addresses the concerns. (Personally, I think their current message is about tarring the opposition rather than offering alternatives, leaving no time for their weak platform to even be expressed.) Tonight, New York's Senator Chuck Schumer was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I had some hope building within me when the senator discussed how much he and others were going to have to do soul searching to discover why they lost in an election when they were very confident of a win. But then he blew it by stating they had the "right message," but somehow it just wasn't getting through to the public.

The right message??? Jeez, Senator Schumer must of done a lot more cocaine than any other winning candidates out there. If Democrats had the right message they would not have lost a race with a president who has high unfavorables about his performance on the war, the economy, jobs, and health care. If Democrats had the right message they would not have lost seats in both houses of congress. I could go on, but what I really want to do is scream. ARGH!