Is this a mandate, or what?

Beldar has an excellent article today that puts the entire Federal election into perspective: Dubya's mandate. The highlights:

• 286 electoral votes in 30 States.
• Bush essentially "traded" New Hampshire for New Mexico, gaining one EV in the process, and also carried Iowa, a real stunner by any standard.
• A 55-44-1 majority in the Senate.
• A 232-201-1 spread in the House.
• Thirty governorships.

The county-by-county map puts the issue into starker relief. Here we see the beauty of our republic: Bush unquestionably commands the larger land area. He even commands the largest share of land areas in many States that Kerry carried. This also shows that the Democrats are now the party of big cities, their voters jammed into crowded tenements (rather like ancient Rome in the last days of the Gracchi, the Marii, Sulla the Happy, Pompey the Great, and the Caesars), while the Republicans are the party of the self-sufficient, God-fearing rural folk.

This is no accident, folks. The extremes of good and bad economic luck, and the worst excesses of entertainment, are to be found in the cities. That has been a universal rule ever since the Great Flood. Read the Bible for any length of time and you will soon get the impression that God is Anti-city. That might not be entirely accurate, but think about this: Home Box Office, when developing a TV show about four women acting like sluts, didn't call it Sex and the Country, did they?

More to the point, the Founders knew what they were doing when they designed their republican system. They did not want a few populous States to dictate policy for an entire federation. Of course, they didn't intend a lot of things that have happened to our republic since Ben Franklin famously said, "Now you have a republic, if you can keep it." The republican ideal is worth preserving--and getting back to--and this election provides the most shining example.