Jim Geraghty has an interesting post over at the (please fellas, rename it soon and get it over with, huh?) Kerry Spot at National Review Online. He's kicking around whether or not President Bush has a mandate in his second term and concludes:

When does the other guy have a mandate? We can quibble over just what percentage marks the threshold, but ultimately, he’s got one when you don’t have the votes to beat him.

I think that's reasonable. Jim's post begins with a quote from Howard Dean:

Since when is fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anyone’s definition? It’s ridiculous.

If it's ridiculous, why is President Kennedy the modern benchmark for Democratic presidents? He squeaked in with less of a total plurality in the votes than Bush received in Ohio alone--and while math was never my strong suit, I think the 49.7 percent of the vote that JFK received is smaller than President Bush's 51 percent. Plus, as some recent historians have noted, there was also quite a bit of electoral college strangeness associated with JFK's win.

But what modern Democrat would argue that he didn't have a mandate? Watch any of the numerous PBS documentaries on JFK and see if they ever say anything remotely along the lines of:

PORTENTOUS FICTIONAL NARRATOR: Kennedy, who barely won against Vice President Nixon, should have remained cautious as a president, in order to earn the trust of a deeply divided nation whose votes were split 50/50 for the two former senators. Instead, after using an imagined "missile gap" as a wedge issue against Nixon; once in office, Kennedy plunged the nation into a costly build-up of the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union. He later cut income taxes in a scheme some would describe as "risky", and then further increased an already strained federal budget through dangerous incursions into Vietnam and an outrageously expensive manned space program.

It's not going to happen, because, to paraphrase Orwell, whoever controls history determines which president has a mandate. As Geraghty notes, just ask Time magazine.