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From the notebook

GOP denial and other items

Even after being decisively thrashed in all corners of the nation, the Republicans are apparently still intent on minimizing the magnitude of what occurred on Tuesday night. Exhibit A is the election analysis offered by Mike Duncan, the lame-duck Republican national chairman. He mocked “the preposterous idea that this election represents a mandate.”

To reiterate what I wrote here last weekend, I’m not convinced that Barack Obama is being handed a mandate, either – partly because I am a professional skeptic, and partly because presidents have often overreached after claiming a mandate and suffered politically as a result.

But what’s amusing about Duncan’s argument – which has been echoed by various GOP surrogates and GOP-friendly commentators such as Robert Novak – is that the Republicans had no qualms about claiming a mandate for George W. Bush after the elections of 2000 and 2004…even though Bush and his party never posted the kind of numbers that Barack Obama and the Democrats put up in 2008.

Bush lost the ’00 popular vote (drawing 540,000 fewer than his opponent), he needed five Supreme Court judges to drag him across the finish line, and his party lost Senate and House seats in that election – yet he framed it as a mandate for his agenda, particularly with respect to tax cuts for the affluent, and Karl Rove assured religious right leaders that Bush would be “a philosophically-driven president.”

Four years later, Bush won the electoral-vote tally by a margin of only 35, and his popular vote victory margin (2.4 percentage points) was the smallest for any re-elected president since 1916 – yet he claimed a mandate for that, as well. He promptly told the press corps that he had “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.” (He somehow believed that the ’04 election gave him a mandate to push partial privatization of Social Security, and we know how that one turned out.)

Now contrast the Bush and Obama election stats. Whereas Bush lost the ’00 popular vote and won it in ’04 by 3 million votes, Obama is currently posting a winning margin of nearly 8 million votes (with the results still trickling in). Bush never won more than 50.7 percent of the popular votes; Obama is currently at 53 percent, with a seven-point victory margin. Bush’s party never picked up six Senate seats in either of his races; Obama’s party just did. Bush never came anywhere close to winning the electoral college by a margin of 200; Obama just did.

Obama also captured 54 percent of Catholics, 66 percent of Latinos, 78 percent of Jews, 68 percent of new voters, and he swiped 9 of the 31 states that were colored red in 2004 (Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Colorado)...and yet, despite all this, the GOP double standard persists. When the Republicans win small, it’s a mandate; when the Democrats win big, it’s not a mandate.

In part, this attitude can be chalked up to the usual political gamesmanship. But it’s also symptomatic of a party in denial, reflexively debunking while hunkered in its bunker. Hypocrisy is not an attractive trait, particularly in defeat.

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And what could be a more appropriate coda for the Republican defeat than the fact that its diminished band of senators will apparently return to Washington with a convicted felon in the ranks? That should do wonders for the party’s tarnished image.

Ted Stevens of Alaska – newly convicted on seven counts in a federal corruption case – seems likely to retain his seat after all the votes are tallied. All of which prompts me to wonder: Why is it legal for a convicted felon to run as a candidate in an election…yet it’s illegal in most states for convicted felons to vote in elections?

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Remember when John McCain charged that ACORN was potentially committing “one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country?” I am still waiting for the Republicans to document a single instance of actual voter fraud on election day, an actual example of anybody showing up with a phony ID, seeking to take advantage of a phony enrollment submitted by ACORN.

Well, where’s the proof of this great fraud in voter history?

Didn’t think so.

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I wasn’t totally sold on the notion that Obama would win this election…until the 30th of October, when Bill Kristol let loose with a bullish prediction about the GOP, declaring on TV that John McCain would “win huge.” Given Kristol’s long track record of being grievously wrong almost all the time (starting with his pie-eyed prognostications about an Iraq war), that’s when I knew Obama truly had it in the bag.

The neoconservative talking head and columnist is always worth hearing and reading, if only so that we can safely conclude the opposite of whatever he is predicting.  For instance, he said during the runup to ’08 that “Fred Thompson knows what he’s doing, and he will be formidable,” which meant, of course, that Thompson didn’t have a clue and was destined to be toast.

This summer, Kristol envisioned a GOP ticket of “McCain-Lieberman” or  “McCain-Ridge,” which meant that we could safely conclude that neither guy had a prayer of being picked.

Last year, he predicted that voters would “recoil” from the prospect of electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress, thereby alerting us that ’08 would be a good Democratic year.

Last year, he also predicted that George W. Bush would go down in history as a successful president, in part because the president would leave behind “a strong economy,” which meant, of course, that Bush would play out his string with the economy in free fall and the conservative deregulation credo in disrepute.

And Kristol's sunny 2005 economic prediction – “Last week the Bush Administration's second-term bear market bottomed out” – was sufficient proof that the worst second-term bear market was still to come.

Obama supporters can only hope that Kristol will soon insist, in his New York Times column, that the new president will prove to be an unmitigated disaster. Such a prediction may well trigger further dancing in the streets.

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Ted Stevens hasn’t yet nailed down his Senate win. Al Franken and Norm Coleman are heading for a recount in the Minnesota Senate race. Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin are heading for a Dec. 2 runoff in the Georgia Senate race; it's noteworthy that Democratic challenger Martin is already running a new TV ad that paints him as sympatico with Obama (clearly an attempt to gin up a big African-American turnout one more time).

In other words, the election season is not yet over; nor will politics suddenly cease once Obama takes the oath. For that reason alone, I have no plans to cease this operation. As Neil Young sings on

, "I won't retire, but I might retread."