These days, electoral maps and permutations of electoral maps have become political mandalas, pored over by voters and pundits alike in an attempt to figure out exactly what might happen November 4^th.  No amount of meditation brings enlightenment.  The remaining toss up states on the Real Clear Politics electoral map are a mixed bag.  Some are trending towards Obama –  Nevada and North Carolina (who would have ever believed that?).  Others, like Indiana, Montana, Missouri and North Dakota, are more than likely going to end up for McCain.  Florida, a state that I felt sure earlier would go handily for McCain, continues to confound pundits by shifting back and forth between Obama and McCain, stubbornly refusing to declare itself.

But the toss up states are not where the real action is.  Because even if the tossups all go to McCain, he is still woefully behind on electoral votes, and would need to turn no less than three states:  Ohio, Colorado and Virginia.  And if even if he succeeded, all he produces is an electoral tie, an eventuality that our own Skeptic Turtle has already addressed.  This explains why the McCain campaign’s final week will be spent largely in Ohio and Virginia, with some forays into Pennsylvania. 

Despite McCain’s desperation tour, it is becoming abundantly clear that the wheels have already come off the “straight talk express,” as the New York Times Magazine reports on the eternal shuffling of McCain’s narrative in an effort to change the dynamic of the campaign, and as reports are now emerging that Sarah Palin has “gone rogue” – deciding to unhitch her wagon from John McCain’s plummeting political star and blaze her own “maverick-ey” trail, setting her sights on after November 4^th, as if the result is a foregone conclusion.

Which brings me to the other “m” word we are now starting to hear breathed, almost in disbelief, with hushed tones and wonder:  Mandate.

Let’s just assume for a minute that the likely scenario plays out, and Nevada and Florida go for Obama, the rest of the tossups go to McCain, and all the rest stay as they lay.  That gives Obama a commanding lead in electoral delegates in the final tally:  338 to McCain’s 200.  He would likely have a popular vote above 50% perhaps significantly above.  If he were to win, he would come close to the kind of numbers with which Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole in 1996, and beat McCain far more handily than Bush beat either Gore or Kerry.

The GOP is fond of reminding us when the shoe is on the other foot, that “elections matter.”  In both 2000 and 2004, Bush declared his comparative squeakers in the electoral college and popular vote a verifiable “mandate” that gave him “political clout” that he quickly made use of to pursue his agenda both at home and abroad, with legislation and with judicial appointments.

If the likely scenario plays out, Obama will have an even stronger case that he has a “mandate” than Bush ever did.  Moreover, with significant Democratic gains in the House and the Senate, Obama will have the necessary votes to pass  whatever he desires, right?  You can already hear the left-leaning pundits on Olbermann and CNN and on Air America salivating over the notion of an Obama win.  They are already setting up the rhetoric to claim that Obama’s victory represents the “triumph” of lefty ideas and a rejection of everything from the “Bush Doctrine” to the “Laffer Curve.”

Now that power does appear to be fully in the grasp of the Democratic Party in a way it has not had for over 10 years, the infighting will begin.  The GOP has been waging its internal war of ideals on the political stage, in a public manner.  During the primaries, The social conservatives, the “guns, God and gays” crowd openly complained as McCain swept through the primary season, claiming that he was too liberal, too soft on social issues, not conservative enough.  After the nomination of Sarah Palin, the bone thrown to these social conservatives to buy their loyalty to the ticket, the fiscally conservative, small government wing of the GOP, the “certain people at Georgetown cocktail parties” as McCain mockingly dismissed them, began to defect in droves.  With them went moderate republicans, aghast at the profligacy of the Bush Administration and the potential of a McCain Administration to be even more disasterous.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, liberals and moderates had their struggles with unity, but these were less policy differences than personal ones.  By all admissions, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were vastly different people with vastly different personal gifts to bring to a campaign and a Presidency, their policy platforms were nearly identical.  Throughout this campaign, despite the significant range of policy opinions available within the Democratic Party, there has been little dissent among the ranks complaining that Obama is not “liberal” enough, not “progressive” enough.  Those that have held that opinion have held their tongues for the most part, seeing the larger task of election as being more important than maintaining doctrinal purity.

That time of unity for the Democrats may well be finished once Obama is sworn in.  Already you can see folks queuing up to reap the “consequences” of this election.  Already there is speculation of what Obama and the Congress will do.

The nearest means by which one may determine what Obama will do with power is to examine what he has done before.  The vaunted episode of Frontline, done for every Presidential election for the last 20 years, called “The Choice” analyzed the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, the first time that the office had been held by an African-American.  The Law Review presidency is awarded via a complicated election process. The interesting thing to note about how he got to be President was that he did so by obtaining not only the support of liberal-leaning law students on the Law Review, but because he had maintained friendly relations with the more conservative Federalist Society members of the Law Review.  True to his identity as a uniting candidate, Obama gave many coveted masthead positions to Federalist students.  This was a deep disappointment to more liberal students, who were sure that once Obama, a liberal, obtained his position, he would benefit those of like mind to him first.

Obama cannot help but notice that the basis of his success as a Presidential candidate has never been based upon appeal to the far left reaches of the Democratic Party.  Despite all of the efforts to tag him as “just another liberal,” Obama has successfully cast himself as a centrist, and he is successfully drawing states in to the Democratic fold that up until now had been solid GOP territory.  The likelihood that Obama will forget what brought him victory, that he will forget to “dance with who brung him” is small.  It is certainly not consistent with his past.

This will of course be disappointing to the far liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and with no one else available to blame, and with the expectations created by the potential of a mandate, it may very well be that Obama’s honeymoon period as a President may be cut short not by the GOP minority in Congress, but by disappointed far left Democrats looking to influence the new President’s agenda.

The truth is that unlike the GOP, Democrats still have to go through the process of waging the internal war for the soul of the Party.  We’ve successfully managed to put it aside on the grounds that the election was more important. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a discussion that needs to be had, and a compromise that needs to be reached with respect to these issues.  And if that discussion is not undertaken civilly, and if compromise does not become the goal of that discussion on the part of everyone involved, Obama’s mandate may very well slip away.

Join us here November 4th, Election Eve, for the final election installment of Iron Pundit vs. Iron Stomach.  The liveblogging, realtime party starts here at 8 p.m.