Mandate

Yglesias argues that the McCain campaign is doing as much as anyone else to provide Obama with a claim to a substantially progressive mandate from the electorate next year.

This is where I think some of the recent “socialism” scare talk and so forth gets interesting. Presumably, come January and February conservatives are going to be wanting to argue that Obama’s got no mandate, that Republican legislators have no need to fear him, and that Democratic legislators should live in terror of overreaching. To that end, it’ll be helpful to argue that Obama got elected as a tepid centrist. But in their last-ditch efforts to beat him, they’re doing the reverse, and dramatically overpainting Obama as a wild-eyed radical ready to unleash Marxism on the country. Well, if you spend a month or two running around saying that, and then the voters back the Marxist anyway, he’s got pretty much carte blanche to do what he wants if he wins.

This is exactly what I said this past Saturday. Saturday's comment was in response to a silly article in the T-P comparing Obama with Huey Long. I kind of turned that around by suggesting that since McCain could be the catalyst for a leftward movement by the new President, it's actually McCain who looks like this generation's Huey Long... although we're not sure McCain is actually this generation's anything anymore.