News to Media: Back-to-Back Majority Vote Wins = Historic Mandate

Earlier this week, The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza [1] wrote a piece that began with what was intended as a rhetorical question: "Quick, name President Obama’s best moment in the 2012 campaign so far? What about Mitt Romney’s high point?"

Cillizza was trying to suggest that neither candidate has had a high point, to make the case that the campaign has been "mediocre", "small" and devoid of substance.

But it's not a head-scratcher what President Obama's best moment has been: his convention. [2]

He and his party delivered a proud defense of his record and his philosophy that "government can be a force for good." [3]

He made a case for a second term agenda [3] that would "reward[] companies that open new plants and train new workers and create new jobs here in the United States of America", set "higher taxes on incomes over $250,000", "reduce our deficit without sticking it to the middle class", "continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet" and "recruit a hundred thousand math and science teachers" ... just to name a few policy goals.

After the voters saw Obama make his case, and saw Clint Eastwood make Mitt Romney's case (wasn't that Romney's high point?) [4], the polls indicate voters sided with Obama.

Cillizza's dismissal [1] of the substantive basis for Obama's successful campaign to date leads him to a very pernicious conclusion: "... the relative smallness of this race — in spite of the declarations by both candidates that this election is about big things — virtually ensures that neither party emerges on Nov. 7 with a meaningful mandate..."

Excuse me? President Obama is on his way to back-to-back majority vote victories, something no president has done since Ronald Reagan, and no Democratic president has done since Franklin Roosevelt.

And he will have accomplished it in a race where each candidate's standard stump speech [5] draws a stark ideological contrast on the role of government [6] nearly every day.

If that doesn't give a president a mandate, then no election can.