President Obama can define his mandate however he chooses. And he knows by now that he will never win over the right no matter what he does. So he should probably be aware of this:

A long string of lawmakers who supported the Bowles-Simpson plan -- which would slash Social Security and Medicare benefits while lowering corporate taxes -- went down in flames last night.

In fact, almost every candidate who was personally endorsed by the authors of the plan was defeated. link

Unfortunately this is what Obama chose in his victory speech to detail as the specific actions he would focus on:

And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. link

Anyway, Woodward said that the reason O didn't get his GB is because he "overplayed his hand" and wanted [gasp!] revenue increases.  

"Overplayed his hand."

Apparently the only successful GB is a complete capitulation to the most extreme bat$hit crazy contingent of the Republicans.  Clearly that's the only way for a Democratic President to be successful.  Oy.

As Bouie says here:

Over the next week, I'll write about the details of Obama's victory, in particular his huge advantage with nonwhite voters--without historic margins (and turnout) among African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, it's likely Obama would have failed in his quest for a second term. Indeed, it should be said that Republicans have themselves to blame for a good deal of this. If not for their categorical opposition to health-care reform, the Affordable Care Act would have never been passed in its current form. If not for their harsh approach to immigration, they might have won greater Latino support over the last four years. If not for their embrace of misogyny, they might have closed the gender gap. If not for their willingness to indulge the worst conspiracies about Obama, they might have made inroads with young people and college-educated voters.

Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.

"A lot of people feel like Christie hurt, that we definitely lost four or five points between the storm and Chris Christie giving Obama a chance to be bigger than life," said one of Romney's biggest fundraisers, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Still to come is a 7 dwarfs mining roller coaster that is still being built.

Paul Krugman chips in his two cents:

Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a "grand bargain" on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory [...]

Republicans are trying, for the third time since he took office, to use economic blackmail to achieve a goal they lack the votes to achieve through the normal legislative process. In particular, they want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, even though the nation can't afford to make those tax cuts permanent and the public believes that taxes on the rich should go up -- and they're threatening to block any deal on anything else unless they get their way. So they are, in effect, threatening to tank the economy unless their demands are met.

Mr. Obama essentially surrendered in the face of similar tactics at the end of 2010, extending low taxes on the rich for two more years. He made significant concessions again in 2011, when Republicans threatened to create financial chaos by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And the current potential crisis is the legacy of those past concessions.

Well, this has to stop -- unless we want hostage-taking, the threat of making the nation ungovernable, to become a standard part of our political process.

Cuban-Americans have never voted for the Dem Presidential candidate. Prior to Tuesday the best ever was by Clinton with 35%.

There were two exit polls Tuesday (Pew Research and Fox News) that actually showed Obama winning the Cuban American vote 49-47. The Miami Herald exit poll had it 50-47 in favor of Romney.

*I'll note here that the Herald poll of Florida just prior to the election also had Romney taking Florida by 5 points.

Los Angeles Times | November 8, 2012
McDonald's monthly sales fall for first time in nine years -- "For the first time since April 2003, monthly sales at McDonald's Corp. went down instead of up, falling 1.8% in October at stores open more than a year. The fast-food giant known for innovating its way through the recession while competitors lagged has lately lost some of its momentum. Last month, the company said its profit for the third quarter tumbled nearly 4% amid a stronger dollar and brutal U.S. competition after sliding 4.5% in the prior quarter. [...] McDonald's stock was down as much as 1% to $85.96 a share in morning trading in New York."

And for the very first time in the series' 50-year history, there's serious Oscar talk not just for its technolocial aspects, but potential nominations for Best Picture, for Sam Mendes as director, Roger Deakins as cinematographer, and for the respective supporting performances for Javier Bardem as the villain and Judi Dench as "M." In particular, Dench's role has become the plot's focal point, in which M is now the target of a personal vendetta being conducted by a disaffected MI6 agent:

"This is the seventh time Judi Dench has played the enigmatic spy-chief M. But it is only in this storming new Bond movie that her M has really been all that she could be. Under the stylish direction of Sam Mendes, Dench's M is quite simply the Bond girl to end all Bond girls. Watching this, I thought: of course. How could I have missed it? The real tension isn't with Moneypenny, but with the boss herself. Now M is an imperious, subtly oedipal intelligence-matriarch with the double-O boys under her thumb. She's treating them mean. She's keeping them keen. And she is rewarded with passionate loyalty, varying with smouldering resentment. It's a combination with its own unspoken eroticism, and it has also created the conditions for one of the most memorable Bond villains in recent times. M demands more and more from her agents, with less and less concern for their safety."