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Think Progress also brings us this video, pointing out many of the numbskulls who are advancing this argument.

This is why I don't watch television. Because practically everytime I turn it on, some pundit is spouting partisan Republican rhetoric as fact, and like as not, some numbskull Democrat is stabbing progressivism and the idea of liberalism in the back as well.

First things first. When people like Robert Novak start talking about how Obama doesn't have a mandate? Go thou to Think Progress and refresh yourself on his hypocrisy...

Right-wing pundit Robert Novak climbed aboard the bandwagon, writing today that neither the large Democratic gains nor Obama’s sweeping popular and electoral vote margins were proof of a mandate:
The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress. […]
[Obama] may have opened the door to enactment of the long-deferred liberal agenda, but he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.
Novak dismissed Democratic congressional gains, noting that they “fell several votes short of the 60-vote filibuster-proof Senate.” However, in 2004 — as President Bush crowed about his “political capital” — Novak didn’t hesitate to agree that Bush’s comparatively narrow victory was proof of a conservative mandate, in a CNN interview just days after the election:

Q: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?
NOVAK: Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. … So the people who say there’s not a mandate want the president, now that he’s won, to say, Oh, we’re going to accept the liberalism that the — that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday. [11/06/04]
As of now, Obama’s popular vote margin stands at 7,401,289 — more than twice Bush’s 2004 vote margin — and Obama has netted 63 more electoral votes than Bush in 2004. In his column, Novak dismissed the Democratic Senate gains this year, even though they have netted five seats for a total of 56, with three more seats potentially up for grabs. By contrast, the conservatives’ so-called 2004 “mandate” netted only four new seats for a total of 55.

More ammunition needed? This Is Not Now, and Has Never Been, a Conservative Country

Fearful Conservatives push new talking point

As David Sirota has noted, the idea that Americans are fundamentally conservative is a myth. Indeed, a majority of Americans want progressive solutions to the nation’s problems, supporting universal health care, expanded environmental protections, a higher minimum wage, the availability of safe and legal abortions, federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, and the rights of same-sex couples to be legally recognized. Additionally, a majority opposes the Iraq War.