Obama: no mandate?

That's the conclusion of Bob Novak,a/k/a the Prince of Darkness, who writes:

[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.

To bolster his statement about Congress, Novak cites the Democrats' failure to capture a filibuster-proof, sixty-seat Senate majority, and their inability to oust Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. And to support his claim about Obama's nonexistent mandate, Novak cites...nothing at all.

This half-assed approach has elicited some pointed commentary on the Chicago Sun-Times Web site, including the following:

SHIELDS: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?

BOB NOVAK, CAPITAL GANG: 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. (CNN, November 6, 2004)

And yes, he really did say it.