Jim Hightower

Let's see – Obama won both the popular vote and the electoral collage tally. Democrats didn't just add to their senate majority, but added such feisty, progressive new senators as Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Mazie Hirono. Even in the House, Dems won the national vote and gained seven seats. Plus, progressives scored victories coast to coast on ballot initiatives.

Wow – the only conclusion you can draw is that the Republican Party now has a mandate to set the policy agenda for the next four years!

Huh? Astonishingly, that's the conclusion of the GOP's Congressional leaders. I guess we should've expected as much from a party so deeply mired in delusion that its chief political guru, Karl Rove, kept hotly insisting on election night that Mitt Romney had won, even though he'd clearly lost.

Later, it was surreal to hear Republican House leader John Boehner declare: "We'll have as much of a mandate as [Obama] will." Then, going from surreal to insane, the GOP's senate sourpuss, Mitch McConnnell, proclaimed, "Now it's time for the president to propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican controlled House."

Memo to Mitch and Boehner: America just had a year-long, nationwide debate on whether to keep pampering Wall Street hucksters and tax dodgers, privatize Medicare and Social Security, continue whacking the country's social safety net, maintain fat subsidies for Big Oil, repeal Obamacare, and other aspects of your Koch-headed, tinkle-down, ridiculous policies – and you lost!

Far from accepting such twaddle from these GOP fabulists, it's time for Obama and the Democrats in Congress to go to the people who elected them, mobilizing this great grassroots majority to push passage of a bold progressive agenda of percolate-up economic prosperity.