So the Democrats are all running around hugging each other and chanting “mandate, mandate, we’ve got a mandate!”  They seem to believe that those 303 electoral votes show a sharp swing in their direction on the part of the population.

The fact that the popular vote was incredibly close hasn’t been part of the discussion at all.  They just believe that they held onto the Presidency and kept control of the Senate because the American people (whom they seem to know personally) has completely changed its thinking in the last two years.

You remember what happened two years ago, right? The famous Tea Party midterm elections, when the Republicans got control of the House of Representatives, and the government came to a grinding halt?  Hard to forget that time, if you ask me!

Because that was when the Republicans started to dance around doing the group hug and chanting, “Mandate, mandate, we’ve got a mandate!”  Back then, it was conservatives who were claiming that the American people (yes, Republicans seem to know them personally, too) had spoken, and were now uniformly conservative thinkers.

American people~ Right wing, conservative, gun toting, anti-government rednecks two years ago?

American people~Left wing, pot smoking, handout craving lazy ass hippies now?

I don’t think so.

I don’t think that Obama won this election because all 300 million of us suddenly embrace the Democratic agenda.  And I don’t think that Romney lost because of a hurricane, a biased media or his own stiff necked unlikeable self.

I think that with only two parties to choose from, its starting to feel like their really isn’t any choice.  Both sides are starting to be really unpalatable.  The space between the two is grower ever more narrow, and we are like a pinball trapped between two opposing flippers.

We elect a bunch of Democrats in ’08.  Gag! We don’t like all the cronyism, the nasty rhetoric, the refusal to compromise or listen.  So we ping to the right and elect a whole bunch of Republicans in 2010.  Yuck! Things are even worse.  Now the whole bunch of them down there in DC are just yelling and screaming and thrashing around. We want some banking reform, some tax reform, some attention paid to the rising oceans.  For two years we watch them push and shove and call each other names.  We’re disgusted.

So we go to the polls again in 2012. But there are only two real choices!!

Ping! We jigged back toward the Democrats this time around.

This is what I would like to say to those in power:

Dear Republicans,  

You didn’t lose because of bias, lies, gay people or hurricanes. You lost because you’re kind of making us feel sick. 

Dear Democrats,

You didn’t win because we all love you and think the sun rises and sets on you.  You won because you made a few of us slightly less sick than the other guys did. 

I predict that unless we start to hear some new voices in our political dialogue we will simply ping back across the aisle in 2014.

I’m getting whiplash.  How about you?