The Bush camp is exulting in the president’s victory over John Kerry on Tuesday. While Bush himself hasn’t come right out and said it, Vice President Dick Cheney and several others have: the election is a “mandate” which the president plans to use to aggressively pursue his policies.

The mandate, according to Cheney and others, comes from the fact that George W. Bush garnered more votes than any presidential victor in the history of U.S. presidential elections. But since numbers can be twisted to mean anything you want them to mean, this analysis bears further scrutiny. The fact is, the losing Democratic challenger also earned more votes than any victor in any previous U.S. presidential election. The previous high was Ronald Reagan in 1984, who beat the crap out of Walter Mondale with 54,455,000 votes. Kerry got 55,713,741. If beating previous presidential winners is sign of a mandate, it seems that there’s as much a mandate for the Democratic agenda as there is for the Republican (minus 3%, the difference in the election).

In any case, the numbers don’t make a mandate, which is defined as “an authoritative command or instruction” (according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language). A 3% margin doesn’t sound authoritative to me. In fact, it sounds like a divisive split almost down the middle.

But the spinmeisters in the administration don’t give much of a damn about the truth, an approach the public is comfortable with given that it’s an all-too-common practice among the laziest and least ethical in our own profession.