Here's what I thought you'd like to hear about today:

Finding Meaning

Hear clips from the press & President Bush, Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, pundits from Pew on exit polls, The Brookings Institution on mandates, and Steven Colbert on Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. Only the best.


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The people have spoken. With the loss of control of the House and Senate in a convincing change of power, pundits and prognosticators are searching for what the voters were telling us on Tuesday. And those of us on the losing side of the electorate are curious about what message the winners will take from their victory. It's not as if the voters were given a choice of policy positions and pulled the lever for one alternative or another on all the hot button issues of the day. We chose people, with the basket of positions they favored or opposed, sometimes not very clearly. We did not chose position papers. But the question remains, "What did we vote for and why?"

I'm going to play some clips from a variety of people who are trying to discern the meaning of the election. First up, here's a clip from the President's news conference right after the election, when the press is trying to claim that the election called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Whenever someone says, "A solid majority of Americans said...", I get very skeptical. It's a phrase that always ends with an unsubstantiated claim that their pet issue was what everyone was voting for. Thanks to C-SPAN for the audio and WhiteHouse.Gov for the transcript.

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Of course no one can really know what the "solid majority of Americans said" with any assurance. But enough voted the Republicans out and the Democrats in that we now get an opportunity to see what we voted for. And if it's not what we want, we can vote them out later. The question now is, how will the President work with the party of Nancy Pelosi. Later in the press conference President Bush was asked that very question.

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But what will the Democrats in Congress do with the mixed signals of the election? The Democrat who worked hardest to get a majority in the House was Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Washington Post proclaims him, in a story headline, the "Democratic 'Golden Boy' Rahm Emanuel, Basking In the Glow of Victory". At his press conference the day after the election, the architect of the Democratic house win was asked what the Democratic plan for Iraq was, that a "solid majority of Americans" seemed to vote for. Thanks to C-SPAN for the video.

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I can't figure out what the Democratic strategy in Iraq is from that clip. How can they claim that the people voted for the "Baker Hamilton Commission" when the results of that commission are weeks away from being released? And now that Rumsfeld is gone, what else will they do? If your strategy is to wait for a strategy, you clearly don't have one.

Well if the House leadership doesn't have a strategy for Iraq, certainly the Senate must have one. The leader in Rahm Emanuel's position on the Senate side was Chuck Schumer. He appeared in a victory lap press conference along with Harry "we killed the Patriot Act" Reid and Dick "our troops are Nazi's" Durbin in Washington when the final two Senate contests were finally decided in the Democrat's favor, giving them a 51 to 49 majority. Here's a clip from C-SPAN.

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That's funny, I didn't hear the word Iraq at all in that speech. Instead, the voters appear to have chosen socialized medicine and free higher education. I'd love some help with paying my health care and college tuition. I'm not looking forward to giving up my cognac, and my third car, and my vacation home so that my daughter can go to college. If Chuck Schumer is offering to pay for them, I'm all for it. But I'm going to hold on to my wallet until the details emerge on this wonderful new "benefit".

The truth is no one knows exactly what the voters chose in this election. But the Pew Center tried. They interviewed voters after they left the polling booth. The Congressional Quarterly runs a post mortem after every election, and C-SPAN covered this one yesterday. C-SPAN had the video. Here is Carroll J. Doherty, Associate Director, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press talking about his exit polls.

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Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution discussed what a "Mandate" is. Hint: It's fiction anyway, but it still changes the behavior of the politicians.

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Finally, Steven Colbert had CNN's Jeff Greenfield on The Colbert Report to discuss his network's exit polls. For a different a perspective, as always, we have Steven.

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That's it for now podcatchers. Charlie Quidnunc reporting from a wet and cold Downtown Seattle, WA.