The battle lines are being drawn in the aftermath of a nasty showdown. At least that is what is being said about Governor Eliot Spitzer and the New York State Legislature. The buzzwords that keep popping up are "reform" and "mandate," and the dispute is being played out in the media. It's kept alive by those who love the fight.

I often wonder what constitutes a mandate. Less than 50 percent of eligible voters even bother to come out and vote. Maybe the mandate should be coming from all those people who didn't even bother to vote in the first place. I'd like to know what's on their minds. Just because a person doesn't vote, is it relatively safe to assume that her thinking is pretty much in line with the way we think?

Or when we discover that someone doesn't think like us, is it imperative that we hold steadfast our position and expend our energies to sway their opinion our way? Would it be more prudent to simply find the middle ground? Mandates are always fuzzy because you have to use some imagination to define them.

Not so with the simple majority rules premise in government. It's fairly cut and dried once a vote has been taken. An issue is presented and then voted on by the body and it either passes or fails according to the vote. It would seem to me that once a vote has been cast, that should pretty much put the issue to rest and then it's time to expend energy on the next issue.

But it seems like we like to keep these lost issues smoldering. Instead of licking our wounds and moving on to the next constructive thing we should be doing for our constituency, we allow for our losses to fester - like those bumper stickers that proclaim, "wide right" and "no goal," implying that somehow our beloved team have been robbed. But was it instead our a case our lack of preparation or our lack of attitude was the thing that robbed us of the win?

In a sense, I was hoping that Spitzer was going to win, but it's obvious that State legislators thought differently about who the new comptroller would be. This loss should not roadblock reform, should not produce gridlock. A word that came up in this debate was gerrymandering. Now there's an idea for a bumper sticker. 'No gerrymandering.' Yep, there's a lot to be done, but it can't get done in the middle of backward looking battleground.

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