Moondate

Not surprisingly, and in keeping with their conduct prior to the election, the administration since has made claims wholly unsupported by actual evidence from planet Earth. Some of the most egregious of these claims involve the so-called mandate given them by voters, and size of same. It's, uh, big, they say. Really big. In fact the biggest.

Like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; like the liaison between Saddam and Osama; like Colin Powell's influence on US foreign policy, this turns out to be mostly a figment of Dick Cheney's imagination. Or perhaps Andy Card's, or William Kristol's — would that Jung were around to theorize on the collective unconscious of neoconservatives. Would he need body count stats for that?

Examples of administration storytelling prowess: from Mr Cheney: "President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate." From William Kristol: "An even larger and clearer mandate than those won in the landslide reelection campaigns of Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996." Like I said: Bush's mandate is big; really big.

We'll have to skip the "clear agenda" part; I heard all three debates, and I can't tell you what it might have been. I do know that "Leave No Child Behind" was a jobs program. After that, it's all a huffy blur. Of course, "Leave No Child Behind" came in the first year of his first term. Does that count as an agenda item for the second term? Maybe he meant he was going to reiterate his support for the already-passed "Leave No Child Behind." Yaay! Cross that one off the list: done.  Or maybe he meant he was going to fully fund it, finally — it was his program, after all. Or maybe he meant he was going to start a National Lawn Mowing Corps, thus uniting Non-Left-Behind Children with Jobs. (Good for the middle class, too: some of them have been known to have lawns.)

If you are enjoying the mandate fantasy, please avert your eyes. (It sounds sinful anyway.) If on the other hand you'd prefer to clasp your fingers around a small slice of reality (hey, maybe yours is a big slice of reality — no offense intended), see John Nichols's column in the current online issue of The Nation. I'll reproduce some of his most salient data here:

• Bush won a popular vote majority of about 3.5 million. (That's roughly 3 percent. That's so low that if it were a mortgage rate, you'd cut off your left fist to get it. And yes, it would have to be the left fist.)

• Bush won an electoral vote majority of 286-252.

• In presidential elections from 1904 through this year, 21 of 25 victors won by a wider percentage of the popular vote than Bush received on Tuesday.

• Over those same 100 years, 23 of 25 presidential victors won by wider margins than Bush in the Electoral College. The only narrower winners were Bush in 2000 and Woodrow Wilson in 1916. In other words, Bush squeaked by with the third skinniest margin in the last 100 years. And one of the two people he outdistanced was himself.

Nichols goes on to point out that the president with the victory margin closest to Bush's was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter's popular-vote margin was identical to Bush's; his electoral margin was larger (297-240). Nobody thought of the Carter presidency as wielding a mandate — in fact, as Nichols reminds us, people thought of it as embattled, beleaguered, just barely scraping by. And the Republicans of the day were not intimidated in the least, in spite of the fact that Carter's congressional majorities were even more formidable than Bush's today.

But I'll also say this: Cheney et al. have faced down the truth by fiat repeatedly over the last four years, and they've yet to see evidence that it won't work. One of the reasons they won at all — by any margin — was their repeated insistence, contrary to all facts and evidence, that Saddam Hussein had provided aid and comfort to Osama Bin Laden. This is a well-demonstrated falsehood, and yet over 70% of those who voted for the incumbents claimed to believe it. They likewise insisted — again, contrary to facts and evidence — that the war in Iraq was a success, that the insurgency was minor and diminishing, and that the invasion as a whole had diminished the threat of terrorism. Demonstrably false, each and every one of these claims. And yet.

If Bush and Cheney and Card and their cohorts declare a mandate (as they have), and if those same people who believed them about Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and Iraq believe them about this (as I see no reason to think they will not), then the mandate, like the second term, will become a reality.

We are in the funhouse now, ladies and gentlemen. Do not underestimate the regime's capacity for deception and scheme. Do not underestimate the population's willingness to go along, especially if it feels good (and spreading democracy with God on your side feels very good). And do not overestimate the power of the truth to fight back. The battlefield now is the American mind, and facts, as weapons, may be of limited use.