This morning’s Washington Post/ABC News poll is chock full of the usual bad news for Republicans – they’re perceived as stubborn and uncompromising, they’ll get the blame if the country goes over the fiscal cliff, the public thinks the deficit can be dealt with without any spending cuts, and so on — but with this interesting caveat: “Nonetheless, barely more than a third of all Americans see Obama as having a broad-based mandate coming out of the November election. Among political independents, which as a group narrowly sided with Republican Mitt Romney over Obama in November, twice as many say the president should compromise with the GOP than say he has a general mandate.”