"Will of the people!" is the correct answer—at least if a Democrat won the election. Actually, the notion that election results represent the "will of the people" is one of the most audacious triumphs of democratic propaganda.

Ever since the Civil War era, presidents have periodically invoked "will of the people" to sanctify their own power. President Andrew Johnson declared in 1867 that "the appointing power"—i.e., himself—"represents the collective majesty and speaks the will of the people." Johnson's "majesty" took a wallop two months later when he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives. Johnson, a notorious drunkard, barely survived a Senate vote that would have ended his reign.

Almost a century ago, President Calvin Coolidge rolled out religious buncombe to consecrate the worship of vote counts. In a 1926 speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge added God's ballot to the election returns, declaring, "We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction." Unfortunately, God forgot to tell Coolidge to run for re-election.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was perhaps the first president to invoke "the will of the people" to sanctify every power grab. In a 1937 fireside chat, he denounced the Supreme Court for thwarting "the will of the people"—which FDR supposedly incarnated because he had been re-elected the previous year. The Court had struck down several New Deal laws as unconstitutional in part because they vested vast arbitrary power in federal bureaucrats. FDR sought to pack the Supreme Court with appointees who would rubberstamp his policies, sparking a backlash that hobbled him until he pulled the nation into World War II.

FDR also bastardized "will of the people" to sanctify tyranny by American allies. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, FDR co-signed a communique with Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that "pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people" in the former Axis nations and liberated countries of Europe. The secret deals cut at Yalta guaranteed that a hundred million lives in eastern and central Europe would be blighted by the Soviet boot.