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Was it a mandate or not?

Once again the commentary in the media has been shown to be wanting.  Poor research, badly articulated, biased and just plain wrong.   By any one's reckoning one would have thought that Obama secured his presidency with a decisive win.   A mandate in fact!    No, no, no say some of the commentators in the USA.    FAIR has collected the responses by the so-called pundits on whether Obama did, or did not, get a mandate from the populace.

"When it comes to explaining election results, there's no precise way to determine whether voters gave the winner a "mandate"--defined by Oxford as "the authority to carry out a policy, regarded as given by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins an election." That makes it interesting to see how media use the expression--and which presidents they think earned one.

In 2004, George W. Bush won 50.7 percent of the popular vote over Democrat John Kerry, and had a 286-251 edge in electoral votes. As FAIR noted (Media Advisory, 11/5/04), many outlets proclaimed that to be a "mandate." "Clear Mandate Will Boost Bush's Authority, Reach," read a USA Today headline (11/4/04); NPR's Renee Montaigne said (11/3/04), "By any definition, I think you could call this a mandate."

So this week Barack Obama won re-election; before the Florida results were final, he had a 303-206 electoral vote advantage and 50.5 percent of the popular vote. What do you call that? For a lot of people in the media, definitely not a mandate.

On CBS Evening News (11/7/12), Bob Schieffer declared, "In the hard world of American politics, the president did not get a mandate yesterday." On the NPR website (11/7/12), a headline was "For Obama, Vindication, But Not a Mandate." The Washington Post's Dan Balz (11/7/12) called it "an uncertain mandate, although Obama will attempt to claim one." While USA Today declared Bush's 2004 victory a mandate, the front-page of the paper the day after the election bore the headline "A Nation Moving Further Apart."

 Continue reading, here - and especially have a laugh about how good ol' Fox News (?) dealt with the Obama win.

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