The numbers can’t be disputed: The Republican Party has regained control of the U.S. House of

The numbers can’t be disputed: The Republican Party has regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives by a wide margin. At this writing, the margin looked like a pick-up of about 60 seats, half again as many as were needed for John Boehner of Cincinnati to replace Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco as speaker of the House.

The word of the night used to describe the GOP victory was tsunami, a thundering, roiling image that seemed to find favor across party and media lines.

Few dared call it a mandate, a word that may have been the favorite descriptive noun of both parties in the first decade of the 21st century.

Maybe that’s because our political lexicon has simply become more descriptive — more tied to the language of natural disasters.

More likely it’s because mandates are increasingly tough to tie down. George W. Bush claimed a mandate, but six years into his presidency, his party had lost control of both the House and the Senate and two years later the presidency was won by a Democrat, Barack Obama. Obama had the White House and his party controlled the U.S. House and the Senate. And some dared called it a mandate.

Now, 1 months after Obama was sworn in, the Republicans, running against Obama, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, have made whatever mandate Democrats may have claimed one of the shortest lived mandates in U.S. political history.

The American electorate has proven itself nothing if not fickle, and in this election a large number of people appeared to be willing to vote for anyone but an incumbent — especially so if the incumbent were a Democrat.

Finding the best course

So what is John Boehner to do? We would suggest that he attempt to oversee a House that takes seriously its role as one half of the legislative branch of the government. In those days when this country was actually making an attempt to balance a budget, the process involved Congress and the White House working together. Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, John Kasich, was fond of boasting during his campaign that when he was chairman of the House budget committee he produced a balanced federal budget. He tended to downplay the role that the Democratic president at the time, Bill Clinton, played in that process.

The truth is that there is a core of dyed-in-the-wool Democrats on one side and equally stalwart Republicans on the other, but elections are decided by the independents who jump back and forth between the parties.

Those independents tend to vote on perceived results, and Tuesday’s election results would indicate that they’ve become much quicker to make the jump.

Republicans can gamble that Tuesday’s vote was about ideology. But ideology doesn’t pay the bills. And we’d suggest that most of those independents who jumped from the Democrats’ ship Tuesday were more concerned about jobs they don’t have and those trillion-dollar deficits they’ve been hearing about. And now Boehner has to prove that he and his new majority really do have a better way of doing business.

Because quickly demonstrable results may be the only mandate any politician can take to the bank these days.