WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama “won the election overwhelmingly” but would not directly answer whether or not Obama’s victory means he has a mandate.
Obama received only two percent more than Republican rival Mitt Romney in the popular vote, garnering 10 million fewer votes compared to the 2008 race. TheDC mentioned these figures to Reid and asked if he thinks Obama has a “mandate for his agenda.”
“I’m not going to get into the George Bush, ‘I have a mandate on Social Security’ type thing. The president won the election overwhelmingly, and we have things that we are obligated to do for the American people,” Reid told TheDC Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
“One is to get our problems solved fiscally and to maintain a strong nation and something we haven’t talked about here this morning, create jobs, which is also — if we get a little cooperation from the Republicans, we can create a lot of jobs.”
Reid said he hopes there is not a repeat of the GOP blocking legislation supported by Obama that would have provided more federal stimulus funding for infrastructure and the hiring of public employees.
“All the infrastructure they stopped us from doing, I hope they don’t do that again. Teachers, firefighters, police officers — you know, we had a piece of legislation on the floor that said, these million people, public employees that have been laid off, we’re going to stop layoffs and bring them back, and we’re going to have a surtax of people making more than $1 million a year would have to pay a surtax of three-tenths of 1 percent,” Reid said.
“People who are making more than a million dollars a year, the vast, vast majority of them are happy to pay that. The only place that people disagree are Republicans in Congress. It’s so, so wrong. So the answer is, we have a lot of things we need to do. Job creation is one of the easiest things we can do. We just need some help from the Republicans.”