Sorry world.

[Question]

For everyone that thinks our country is "divided", consider this.

The most votes (% wise) that a President has ever got was 61%. And if I recall my liberal history books correctly, the country was divided then and voters were just voting against McGovern instead of for Nixon. (NewsFlash: 61% of people do not merely vote against somebody.)

Of course, the losing side is going to be unhappy with the election results. I definitely was very despondent after 1996. But that does not mean the country is "divided".

[oscarmitre]

It's a fair point, about this alleged division I mean. It doesn't really accord with what I understand about politics in a liberal democracy. Where there's a "landslide" and one party garners the overwhelming majority of the vote that is seen as dangerous to the democracy in that there could be a temptation for the winners to claim a massive mandate and then govern with no regard for the minority point of view.

On the other hand the conventional wisdom holds that where there is a close election and the majority is quite slim then that augurs well for good government in the sense that the winning party governs in the knowledge that there is a very sizeable minority of the electorate that disagreed with their policies.

In the Presidential election, as I understand it, it was reasonably close (given the vagaries of the electoral college system where all but two states give all electoral college votes to the winner in that state). So from that it follows that President Bush is in the second situation I described above. From that I would expect he would make policy decisions in the knowledge that a very sizeable minority of the electorate disagreed with his policies.

However if he goes for broke, if he claims he has a mandate to impose policy then it will be a fair claim to say there is division. It remains to be seen what he does. I have to say that having read his claims about spending what he calls "political capital" I'm not convinced that he understands this. I think he thinks he can actually go for broke and there won't be a backlash. John Stuart Mill warned against the "tyranny of the majority", there could be an interesting object lesson in governing a liberal democracy coming up.