Looks like Obama overshot and pulled in 53% of the popular vote....

So I suppose he over-spent getting that last unnecessary 2%.
Though "mandate margin" is probably money well spent in terms of laying some political capital into the bank.

To further stoke hybrid8's ire, I will note that if a mere 4 million of the 120 million people who voted had voted the other way, then McCain would have won the popular vote.

A VERY long way from his dream of a 90% mandate.

But to ease his pain, I will point out that, based on the Wikipedia pages that Bonzi linked earlier, it looks like
in the past couple hundred years (if you ignore 1820), about the biggest margins ever seen were about 60/40.
And that includes 1984 when Reagan won the electoral vote of 49 out of the 50 states!
And Clinton never got 50% of the popular vote.
So Obama has far exceeded Clinton in that regard.

So Obama won a (relatively) crushing electoral victory of 2 to 1, but the Democratic congresspeople are quite aware
that if they use their quite substantial mandate so injudiciously as to tick off a few million citizens, they could lose quite a few seats in the mid-term elections in 2 years.

So I'm not saying that they shouldn't absolutely go in and do exactly what their constituents elected them to do...
but those up for re-election in 2010 in 50/50 districts will tend to be a bit more bi-partisan in their approach
than the Pelosis and Feinsteins who have absolutely no chance of losing their seats no matter what they do.

(And Pelosi is even preaching the gospel of bi-partisanship at this moment. Though that may be mostly in an attempt to try to get some stuff done during the upcoming lame duck session.)