Did Obama Ever Really Have A 'Mandate?'

The Weekly Standard has an excellent story by Noemie Emery that analyzes the very tenuous "mandate" that Obama received from the voters in 2008.
It's like I've said all along: Once the economy collapsed in the fall of '08 there was no way that McCain could win -- or that Obama could lose. Many forget that McCain was actually besting Obama in the polls before the economic collapse.
Why? Because America was then (and remains now) a center-right country and self-proclaimed conservatives continue to make up the largest single group among the electorate.
But when people start losing money rapidly and they see the economic situation unraveling they become justifiably alarmed. And when they are alarmed and frightened they will do things they wouldn't otherwise do.
So, they did the only thing they thought they could do at the time: They capriciously put their trust in a seemingly silver-tongued miracle worker who was actually an unveted, untested, somewhat aloof and often clueless novice.
Anyway, here's an excerpt from the Weekly Standard:

Before the crash, as David Paul Kuhn wrote on RealClearPolitics later, McCain led Obama in the Gallup polls for nine days in succession; after, he never led again. Before, Obama cracked the 50 percent mark only once, and that was at the peak of his convention; after, he passed it 33 times. He won nine states Bush had carried four years earlier, but in six of these (including Ohio and Florida) McCain tied or led him before September 15. Why? Most of these states had large, wealthy suburbs around their big cities, where stockholders and homeowners saw huge paper losses. It was during this period that Democrats made their gains among whites, and white males.
At the same time as this massive swing towards the Democratic ticket, polls showed that the ideological split remained where it had been in the Clinton/Bush era: self-identified conservatives around 41 percent, moderates around 37 percent, liberals around 21 percent. Many people who voted for Obama were not in fact liberal, but centrist or center-right voters unnerved by the crash and the chaos in the Republican party, and drawn to Obama’s misleading aura of calm. This meant there was also a split in Obama’s electorate: The progressives liked his liberal ideas, the centrists his so-called “conservative” temperament; the progressives wanted transformation, the centrists stability; the progressives wanted the government grown, the centrists wanted the economy stabilized; the centrists were prepared for the small shift to the left that comes with the usual change from a center-right to a left-center government, the progressives were bent on sweeping and radical change. 

So, Obama never really had a viable, cohesive mandate -- though everyone wished him well and hoped for the best. Given the historic nature of his election and what many interpreted as his likability, he actually came into office with an enormous amount of goodwill.
But that's all history now. All gone.
Click here to read the entire article.