A free republic is never in more danger than when its chief
executive believes he rules by mandate. It should encourage no
one – not even President Obama's supporters – that many of his
partisans are encouraging him to see his re-election as a
mandate. America's political landscape is littered with the
wreckage wrought from Chief Executives, Democrat and Republican,
who believed voters were giving them a license to govern like an
autocrat. President Andrew Jackson perhaps started what Yale
political scientist Robert A. Dahl calls "the myth of the
mandate" when he advanced the idea that a President's election
is an automatic granting of a mandate. There's a troublesome
tendency on the part of some victors to believe the mandate
doesn't even require a bug-squashing victory, as Ronald Reagan
showed in 1980, when, with just 50.9 percent of the vote, he
trumpeted his "mandate." Theodore Roosevelt had no popular
mandate at all when he became President, since, as Vice
President, he stepped into office when William M