The Broad Mandate, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #300 | @MDWorld

November 12, 2012 Mike Gold 13 Comments

The popular vote was very close, but these days that’s standard operating procedure. The tally in the electoral college was far more substantial: Obama’s 332 to Romney’s 206 and, while I like both the outcome and the margin, the fact remains the electoral college is and always was a stupid idea. “States rights” is a concept that is always in conflict with a truly united United States of America.

But I maintain Barack Obama won reelection with a very broad mandate, one better reflected in the electoral count than in the popular vote. Obama took the following groups by substantial margins:

The black vote

The Latino vote

The Asian vote

The women’s vote

The college-pedigreed vote

The Catholic vote

The Jewish vote

The Muslim vote

The atheist vote

So what did that leave Romney? The day-traders. The rich who think they are above paying taxes. Those beholden to the oil racketeers. And the large stupid white guy vote.

This latter group has fallen under severe inspection, but really it’s a no-brainer. If you think the entire weight of preserving your family, your future, and the way of life to which you have been accustomed rests on your shoulders, then you are highly susceptible to the politics of fear. The Republicans lost their best fear-provoking tactics: the homosexual assault on marriage argument, the Democrats-are-soft-on-blowing-bad-guys-heads-off argument, the “only the rich can create jobs” argument, and the “Democrats want to kill your grandmother” argument.

It was a very, very bad day for the current crop of self-defined conservative Republicans. Obama got most of the vote he received four years ago, and presidential reelections are always a plebiscite on past performance. He almost ran the board on the valued swing states, losing only North Carolina. Winning Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida was quite an achievement.

Why did this happen? There are a million reasons; here are the three most important.

One. People like Obama and after they washed aside the rhetoric they trusted him more than Romney. He didn’t fulfill all his promises but he delivered a hell of a lot and most of the rest he couldn’t get through the Republican congress. I think a lot of people understood this.

Two. The Republicans have managed to create a nominating system that selects not the best candidate or even the most electable candidate, but the one who is most bland and least loony. If in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king, then compared to Gingrich, Santorum, Cain and Bachmann, Romney came off like Adlai Stevenson – who also didn’t win. Romney was an empty suit selling chameleon lizard oil, a drunken sailor incapable of getting his sea legs firm on his own constantly shifting sands. The electorate who might have voted against Obama didn’t have a clue what they would be voting for in Romney.

Three. Donald Trump is a complete asshole. This wasn’t particularly important to the race, but it can’t be said enough.

Shoring all this up were the actions in a handful of states regarding gay marriage and decriminalization of marijuana. In the past all state measures to ban same-sex marriage passed – 38 out of 38. Last week, they all failed. At the same time two states decriminalized possession and use of marijuana. Both actions were akin to taking a crap in the face of the Religious Right; both actions were long overdue.

All this fed into the general feeling of hypocrisy that overwhelms the contemporary Republican party. After all, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Gary Johnson, George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln were all marijuana smokers, as were Republican heroes James Madison, James Monroe, Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor and George Washington. And, as it turns out, the children of famous Republicans tend to be at least just as likely to be homosexual as those of the rest of us.

The winner of last week’s election was sanity. It wasn’t change: with the Senate supermajority protected by both parties and the Republicans running the Congress like a gaggle of spoiled, petulant children, Barack Obama is going to have to show much more of a kick-ass attitude during the next four years than he did the past four. The difference is, now Barack’s got nothing to lose. Now is the time, to quote a famous Republican rock-and-roller, for “No More Mister Nice Guy.”

At the same time, the old school Republicans have a great opportunity to take their party back from the rabble of the tea party and the obnoxiously impotent neocons. They can restore their genuinely conservative concepts by acknowledging the fact that separation of church and state is not only best for state but for church as well.

Yeah. Good luck with all that.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place. That same venue offers us the weekly Great American Popcast, co-hosted with Mike Raub. Gold also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.