A concrete agenda and landslide victory might not even guarantee a president his mandate in a capital as polarized as Washington.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's difficult for democracy to function properly under the most favorable circumstances, but it has no chance at all when millions of voters are divorced from objective reality and incapable of understanding what is going on in Washington.
A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.
Washington is paralyzed by extreme political rhetoric that creates powerful sound bites but poor policy.
Washington isn't utterly dysfunctional.
Washington is politics! Somehow if people have political objectives, then those objectives are automatically disqualified? If that's the case, the Democrats have no business being legitimized about anything because everything they do is political.
Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public.
There's a void of leadership in a lot of Washington. I think one of the reasons why there's so much angst across the country.
The diversification of the people's demand could not be followed by the state apparatus.
The presidency is not an entry-level electoral job.
The sentiments in Hawaii about Washington's failure of leadership are no different than the rest of the country.