The final popular voting results are 62,049,770 for Barack Obama to Romney’s 58,757,388. So, out of a total of 120.807,158 votes cast there was a 3,292,382 advantage for the President meaning he won by about 2.7% of the vote.
Now if you deduct from that total the people who voted because they got a free phone or birth control pills or simply because he was black or because he caused their 25 year old married son to be included under the parents health insurance, I estimate the real difference in the vote was 6 which included Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Feinstein, Sanders and Schumer and those sextuplets don’t constitute a mandate.
Mandate
A command or authorization to act in a particular way on a public issue given by the electorate to its representative: The president had a clear mandate to end the war.
Needless to say the President acts like he has a mandate or perhaps he must act that way because he has no idea how to compromise or negotiate. Consider his intransigent position on raising tax rates on the “wealthy;” tax rates mind you, not just taxes.
I recall when negotiating employee benefits we wanted to raise the employee share of the premium mostly because we needed to lower employer costs, but also because our cost-sharing percentage was lower than other employers. But our real goal was not only to lower costs, but to make sure the employees not only were more aware of the costs, but they also had an incentive to care.
A higher premium saves money, but after a pay day or two the increase is forgotten. A better way to achieve the real goals was to increase deductibles and co-payments. Not only do you save money, but you incent people to be more prudent in using the benefits and you focus the additional cost mostly on the employees who use the coverage as opposed to all employees enrolled.
So, what’s going on with a president who rejects alternative revenue increases accomplishing the same or similar result out of hand, but insists on his way or no way.
Is he driven only by ideology? Is he trying to make the 98% feel good by sticking it to the 2%? Who knows, but this type of behavior is reason for real concern in my view.
PS. Don’t get me wrong, raising taxes in the quest to reduce a deficit by giving Congress and the President more money to spend is never a good idea. However, the ship for any rational spending reform and management left port a long time ago.
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