Big Picture: What does it mean, what's it all for?

For E.J. Dionne the election is a mandate on trickle down economics:

For years, Republicans have argued that the way to help struggling working people is to give more money to the wealthy. Obama is saying that we should cut out the middleman and help working people directly.

Ezra Klein concurs:

If Obama wins, it's going to be very easy for folks to claim that the old conservative pressure points of taxes and government have dulled, and we're entering an era in which economic instability and widening inequality necessitate a more assertive role for progressively-conceived governance.

David Sirota goes further, arguing that this election is a choice between two competing visions of America, that of Ronald Reagan versus that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He writes:

McCain promises to "follow in [Reagan's] tradition and in his footsteps" while vilifying Obama as a 1930s-era "socialist" looking to "redistribute wealth." Obama counters by invoking Roosevelt's speeches and depicting the financial meltdown as "the final verdict" on McCain's "failed philosophy" (i.e., Reaganism).

Mind you, neither personifies these predecessors. Obama's moderate record is not FDR's quasi-socialism, and McCain has renounced some of his Reagan-inspired dogma.

Both also ignore inconsistencies. Obama criticizes the "failed philosophy" of Reagan conservatism while infusing some of his own prescriptions with such conservatism. McCain attacks Obama's "socialism" after voting for the bank bailout bill - the most aggressive stroke of socialism in contemporary American history.

But all that is less important right now than the duo's binary framing. They both effectively say a vote for McCain is a vote to continue Reagan's trickle-down tax cuts and free-market fundamentalism, and a vote for Obama is a vote to resurrect Roosevelt's regulations and redistributions. And because this choice has been made so clear - because we know what we're voting on - whoever wins will have a huge mandate to implement the ideology he thematically represented.

Sirota concludes by citing Marc Ambinder and then referencing FDR's inaugural address:

"As the Republican ticket continues to run against the very idea of progressive politics, they are sowing the seeds of the post-election realignment narrative," writes the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, adding that a McCain loss in such an ideologically polarized contest means "Democrats can justifiably claim that conservatism itself has been rejected."

That would be the very mandate for "direct, vigorous action" Roosevelt described in his 1933 inaugural address. Should a President Obama try to capitalize on it, he will have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Additionally, by "sowing the seed of the post-election realignment narrative", the Republican ticket--read: McCain campaign--also sows the seed of a conservative counter-narrative: that the McCain campaign alone bears responsibility for creating the conditions that swept the Democrats into the halls of power in Washington. Yet again, the right will find another excuse to ignore all evidence contrary to their assumptions.